[...] How unfathomable are the ways of fate! I have just survived the most dreadful catastrophe & this, together with yesterday’s experiences in Weimar, has made a different man of me & pointed me in a new direction. - Consider, my dear Minna, how during all the years of my appointment in Dresden I have nursed the corpse of the most bitter resentment: the new path I embarked on in my art proved to be fraught with difficulties, causing me to stumble at every turn: consumed with an inner rage, I finally turned my back on my art, which now brought me little else but suffering - , you know that I almost regretted the ink & paper which I felt I was wasting on writing a new opera. Deeply dissatisfied with my position & finding little pleasure in my art, sighing beneath a burden which you unfortunately refused entirely to understand, so deeply in debt that my regular income would have satisfied my creditors only after many years & the most shameful constraints, — I was at odds with the world, I ceased to be an artist, frittered away my creative abilities & became - in thought, if not in deed - a revolutionary plain & simple, in other words I sought fresh ground for my mind’s latest artistic creations in a radically transformed world. The Dresden revolution & all its consequences have now taught me that I am by no means made out to be a real revolutionary: I realized from the unhappy outcome of the uprising that a true, victorious revolutionary must act in total disregard for others, - he must not think of his wife & child, nor of his hearth & home, - his single aim is: - annihilation & if our noble Heubner had chosen to act in this way in Freiberg or Chemnitz, the revolution would have triumphed. But it is not people like us who are destined to carry out this fearful task: we are only revolutionaries in order to be able to build on new ground; what attracts us is not to destroy things but to refashion them, & that is why we are not the people that fate needs - these people will arise from within the lowest ranks of society; - we and others like us can have nothing in common with them. Look! I herewith sever my links with the Revolution. . . .
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 86