[...] Yes, indeed, my dear, kind Liszt! It is to you that I owe the fact that I can soon become a complete artist once more. I regard the final resumption of my artistic plans to which I am now turning as one of the most decisive moments of my life: between the musical composition of my Lohengrin and that of my Siegfried there lies a world of tumult, but a world - I know - which has also been fruitful. I had to put my entire previous life behind me, while giving conscious expression to the new ideas that had begun to dawn in it, but resisting the inevitable temptation to reflect upon it - which I was able to do by thinking intently about the object in question - before throwing myself once again, in clear and calm self-consciousness, into the blissful unconsciousness of artistic creation. I shall spend this winter, then, clearing everything away that lies behind me: I wish to enter into a new world, free and unencumbered, without any burden to weigh me down, a world to which I bring naught but a cheerful artistic conscience. - My essay on the nature of opera, the final fruits of my deliberations, has assumed greater dimensions than I had first supposed: but if I wish to demonstrate that music (as a woman) must necessarily be impregnated by a poet (as a man), then I must ensure that this glorious woman is not abandoned to the first passing libertine, but that she is made pregnant only by the man who yearns for womankind with true, irresistible love. The necessity of this union between poetry and music in its fullness and entirety (a union desired by the poet himself) was something I could not demonstrate simply by means of abstract and aesthetic definitions — which generally fail to be understood or to make any impression: I had to attempt to show, with the most manifest clarity, that it derives from the state of modern dramatic poetry itself. And I hope to be fully successful in this. - [...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 118