[...] From Weimar I have now also received offers for a new opera: I am to deliver it by 1 July 1852, by which time I shall have been paid a total of 500 thalers. - I have now reached a number of new conclusions concerning my plans for this work. When I took a closer look at “Siegfried’s death” with a serious view to having it performed in Weimar next year, the whole thing inevitably struck me as utterly impossible. Where would I find the necessary performers and an audience for it? - But throughout the whole of this past winter I have been plagued by an idea which finally took possession of me in a sudden flash of inspiration, so much so that I now intend carrying it out. Have I not already written to you concerning a non-serious subject? It was the one about the lad who leaves home “to learn fear” and who is so stupid that he never learns what it is. Imagine my shock when I suddenly discovered that the lad in question is none other than - young Siegfried who wins the hoard and awakens Brünnhilde! - The matter is now resolved. Next month I shall do the text for “young Siegfried”, for which I am now collecting my thoughts. In July I shall tackle the music, - and I have such shameless confidence in the warmth of the subject-matter and in my own endurance that next year, with my strength unimpaired, I plan to get as far as the composition of “Siegfried’s death”. - “Young Siegfried” has the enormous advantage of conveying the important myth to an audience by means of actions on stage, just as children are taught fairy-tales. It will all imprint itself graphically by means of sharply defined physical images, it will all be understood, - so that by the time they hear the more serious “Siegfried’s death”, the audience will know all the things that are taken for granted or simply hinted at there - and - I shall be home and dry, - the more so in that a far more popular work, which is much closer to people’s perception and which deals less with an heroic subject-matter than with the high-spirited and youthfully human “Young Siegfried”, will give the performers a practical opportunity to train and prepare themselves for solving the much greater task presented by “Siegfried’s death”. - Both works, however, will form totally independent pieces, which only on their first airing will be presented to the public in this particular order, but which can thereafter be given on their own - according to individual preferences and abilities. And never again shall I have to envisage a general, abstract audience, but a specific public to whom I can communicate my intentions directly in order that I may be understood by them. -
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 121