My dear friend,
Only recently did I discover for certain that you and your companions in misfortune were allowed to receive letters not only from your immediate dependents but from acquaintances as well, provided that such letters touched only on matters of personal interest, or at least that they were unconnected with political issues. [...]
[...] I have recently given renewed and detailed expression to my feelings as an artistic being: on the subject of art itself in a fairly substantial book, “Opera and Drama”, and on the relationship between myself as an individual and the subject of my art in a “Communication to my Friends”, which I am having published as the foreword to an edition of my three poems, “The flying Dutchman”, “Tannhäuser” and “Lohengrin”. The first of these will be published by Weber, the second by Breitkopf and Härtel. How I wish I might be allowed to send you these books! Härtels are now having the vocal score of Lohengrin engraved, too, and - this will really surprise you - they intend doing the same with the full score of this opera. You will gather from this that the general feeling towards me as an “artist” has now become much more favourable: but - in the “communication” already mentioned - I have most emphatically rejected any suggestion that I might agree with the view that the “man” be distinguished from the “artist”; indeed, I have drawn attention to the folly of such a distinction. How disreputable and, to be frank, how worthless the whole of our present-day “art” has become has only recently become clear to me now that that art has cast aside the last vestige of its shame and publicly admitted that it is concerned at all costs simply for its own survival. How unhappy a man of my stamp must feel in these circumstances I scarcely need tell you: I am compelled to resign myself open-eyed to a life of illusion in order to be able to justify an activity which, conversely, is still capable of blinding me to how bad things are in general. All further theorizing now disgusts me: Liszt has inspired me to write a new work. And so I have written the poem of a “Young Siegfried” which, I may say, afforded a good deal of pleasure. My hero grew up, untamed, in the forest, and was reared by a dwarf (the Nibelung “Mime”) in order to kill the dragon which watches over the hoard. This Nibelung hoard constitutes an uncommonly crucial element in the work: crimes of every description are associated with it. Siegfried is more or less the same young lad as the one who is to be found in the fairy-tale, and who leaves home “to learn fear” - which he will never succeed in doing since his intense feeling for nature means that he only ever sees things as they are. He despatches the dragon and kills the dwarf who brought him up - and who secretly plans to slay him to obtain the hoard for himself. Siegfried, longing passionately for an end to his loneliness, now hears the voice of a woodbird - having acquired the gift to do so when he accidentally tasted the blood of the dragon - , and the bird directs him to Brünnhilde who - surrounded by fire - lies asleep on a rock. Siegfried passes through the fire and awakens Brünnhilde - womankind - in the most blissful of love’s embraces. - I cannot intimate any further details here: but perhaps I may be allowed to send you the poem itself. - Only one other thing: - in our animated conversations we already touched on the subject: - we shall not become what we can and must be until such time as - womankind has been wakened. -
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 124