[...] I tell you in all honesty: I am totally incapable of taking part in an intrigue à la “verre d’eau”; if my only hope lay in such a course of action, I should pack my bags tomorrow and decamp to some village in Germany: I want to work, as I know I can, but to sell my wares in this market - that is something I cannot do. This local trafficking in art is so contemptible, so rotten and so moribund that all it needs is a man of courage who knows where to strike at it with his scythe. My dearest Liszt, - far from all political speculation, I none the less feel impelled to speak out: art will not grow in the soil of the counter-revolution; initially, it may not even grow in the soil of the revolution, unless we take steps in good time to see that it does. Out with it! tomorrow I intend sitting down and writing a decent article on the theatre of the future for one or other leading political journal. I promise you that, as far as possible, I shall leave politics out of it and in that way compromise neither you nor anyone else: but as far as art and the theatre are concerned, I shall - with all possible decorum - permit myself to be as red as possible, since no other shade will help us except this one particular primary colour. But I believe this is also the most prudent procedure, and the man who, for reasons of prudence, urged this course of action upon me as the one most likely to succeed is none other than your representative - Belloni. He says that I must have money here, like Meierbeer, or, rather, more than Meierbeer, or: - I must make people afraid of me. Well, I have no money, but what I do have is an enormous desire to commit acts of artistic terrorism. Give me your blessing, - or even better: give me your support! Come to Paris and lead the hunt; let’s fire away, and leave a trail of dead rabbits to the right and to the left of us. -
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 90