Please accept my most sincere thanks, my dear Herr Hanslick, for sending me your article, which I received this morning on New Year’s Day. Your review of my “Tannhäuser” is so comprehensive, and its thrust as flattering to me as it is welcome, that I am left in no doubt as to the impression which my work has had on you. I cannot of course pass judgement upon your own judgement, as you so modestly invite me to do, since there can surely be no judgement as biassed as my own. If you wish to know the feeling that I experienced on reading through your article, then I must confess since the truth demands it - that it was one of extreme anxiety. Whether I read praise or censure concerning myself, I always feel as though the reviewer had thrust his hand into my entrails in his attempt to examine them; on this point I cannot suppress a certain maidenly shyness in which I think of my body as my soul: any performance of my operas in the presence of an audience is for me a constant battle against such boundless inner turmoil that there have often been times when I have sought to prevent performances from taking place if I did not feel myself equal to that struggle. I am fully convinced that criticism is far more useful to an artist than praise: the artist who is destroyed by such criticism deserves to go under, - only the one whom such criticism encourages has any true inner strength: but that praise, like censure, is bound to affect the artist very deeply, inasmuch as nature has given him the keenest spur of passion, must be seen as self-evident.
The more the works I create are marked by an increasingly well-defined artistic consciousness, the more I am attracted by the whole man; I wish to create men of flesh & blood & bones, I wish my characters to walk & move about freely & truthfully, - and I often marvel that so many people perceive only the flesh & examine its softness or hardness. Let me express myself more clearly & consider only a single limb of the body: - nothing has given me greater satisfaction than the effect produced upon audiences by the Song Contest, taken as a whole, in the majority of performances of Tannhäuser ( - whether this was also true of the performance which you attended, I do not clearly recall - ): what I discovered was that each of the individual songs was greeted with lively applause, & that the applause rose to the most unwonted pitch of excitement during the final songs & at the concluding outburst of horror on the part of the assembled company; - I say that this observation gratified me greatly, since this observation of extreme naïveté on the audience’s part confirms me in my belief that it is possible to achieve a noble aim. Very few people could be certain whether they had the musician or the poet to thank for their response, & my sole concern must be to leave this issue unresolved. I have no special ambition to see my poetry overshadowed by my music, but I should be guilty of dismembering myself & exposing an untruth if I were to insist upon doing violence to the music for the sake of the poem. I cannot broach a poetic subject if it is not already conditioned by music: it follows, however, from this higher purpose of mine that my Song Contest, although dominated by the poetic element, would not have been feasible without music. - But a work of art does not exist until such time as it takes on visible form: in the case of a drama this moment is its representation on stage, - and as far as it lies within my power to do so, I mean to master this aspect, too; indeed, working towards this goal is something which I regard as almost on a par with the remaining aspects of my creativity. In this sense, success is expressed only in terms of the immediate success of the performance itself - once the great mass of the people has come to accept what is so strange & unusual about the work; & it consoles me to know that in achieving this noble end only noble means are permissible. Each time I have fallen short of this ideal, I have recognized that the flaw lay not in the individual means but in the essential features of the subject as a whole.
There is perhaps one other aspect to bear in mind where music is involved, its powerfully sensorial element forces its way so far into the foreground that the conditions for its effectiveness must appear almost uniquely determinative. But whether the unique quality of music enables it in every case to do justice to what poetry - however musical - has to offer, whether it is capable of giving wholly adequate expression in every case to the claims of dramatic passion, this is something I do not yet venture to decide. Gluck’s poems certainly made no exhaustive demands upon music’s affective potential, being more or less confined to a certain circumscribed & conventional pathos - that of Racinean tragedy - & in those instances where such pathos should have been transcended, Gluck’s music is unmistakably deficient. The poems of Mozart’s operas had even less in common with these fundamental truths of human nature: the one exception is “Donna Anna”, but even here the possibilities are far from exhausted. What Spontini offers us in the second act of his Vestal Virgin (Julia’s scene) & what Weber offers on rare occasions in Euryanthe (e.g. the moment after she has betrayed the secret to Eglantine etc.) is limited to that object of general censure, “diminished-seventh music”, & for my own part at least I feel bound to point out how restricted in this respect are the achievements of our predecessors. That we have fallen so far short of the highest & truest potential of opera in employing such devices - & I speak not of their purely musical aspect but of the dramatic work of art as a whole - is incontestable: & it is in this sense & from the standpoint of my own creative abilities - which I am more inclined to doubt in than I am to overestimate - that I regard my present & forthcoming works as attempts to prove whether opera is still feasible.
Do not underestimate the power of reflection; the unconsciously created work of art belongs to periods remote from our own: the work of art of the most advanced period of culture can be produced only by a process of conscious creation. The Christian poetry of the Middle Ages, for ex., was immediate & unconscious: but no fully authentic work of art was produced at that time, - that was something reserved for Goethe in our own age of objectivity. That only the most fertile human nature can effect this wondrous combination between the power of the reflective intellect, on the one hand, & the fecundity of the more direct creative power on the other - this is what makes these highest manifestations of art such rare phenomena, & although we have good reason to doubt whether such giftedness will reveal itself in the immediate future in the area of art we have been discussing, a more or less happy blend of the two intellectual qualities outlined above must even now be assumed to exist in every artist who serves the true cause of art, - and the separation of these two gifts must be regarded - strictly speaking - as unconducive to attaining this higher goal.
That a world of difference separates us is revealed by your high opinion of Meyerbeer; I say this without the least embarrassment, since Meyerbeer is a very close personal friend of mine, & I have every reason to value him as a kind & sympathetic man. But if I were to try to sum up precisely what it is that I find so offensive about the lack of inner concentration & the outer effortfulness of the opera industry today, I would lump it all together under the heading “Meyerbeer”, & I should be all the keener to do so because I see in Meyerbeer’s music a great skill at achieving superficial effects which prevents his art from attaining a noble maturity, & the reason for this is that it denies the essential inwardness of art & strives instead to gratify the listener in every way possible: - the man who strays into the realm of triviality must pay for his transgression at the cost of his own more noble nature; - but he who seeks it deliberately, that man is - fortunate, for he has nothing worth losing. -
You see how talkative you have made me! I hope that in the process you will not forget the main brunt of my argument but will allow me to express once again my thanks for the great effort you have made on my behalf, & for the generous intention which lay behind that effort; now that I have prattled on to my heart’s content, I too feel how useful it was for you to have achieved that intention in every conceivable respect.
Fare you well & be so good as to write to me again soon.
Yours,
Richard Wagner.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 76