[...] I have now made a proper start on my course of treatment: apart from my diet - from which I do not exclude the occasional glass of good wine - it consists of a cold bath in the morning and a fifteen-minute warm one (22 degrees) in the evening. Its effect on me is most soothing and gently invigorating. Above all, it does me good to get out into the open air, where I wander around for 2 - 3 hours every morning before settling down to my work. The time I spend at work never lasts more than 2 hours: through working for 5 - 6 hours, as I often used to do in the past, I seriously overtaxed my nerves. - I have now finished the complete draft of the “Valkyrie” (I): tomorrow I shall make a start on the verses.
I am again more than ever moved by the comprehensive grandeur and beauty of my subject: my entire philosophy of life has found its most perfect artistic expression here. How I wish you were here so that we might often talk together, and I could tell you things which I now have to save for such time as I can submit them to you in written form. - After this work I do not suppose I shall ever write another opera poem! it is the finest and most perfect work ever to have flowed from my pen. Once the verses are finished, I shall then return to being a musician once more, and then be only - a performing artist! I almost hope that I live - or be allowed to live - long enough to do so. -
There were many things I had to tell you, arising from various essays about myself which I have read: I may tell you what these things are at a later date. I have just read the first two articles by Julius Schaffer in the N.B.M.Z., and it was once more a matter for regret that the man has not yet read my “Preface”. What he says, for ex., about alliterative verse (which he cannot find in Lohengrin!) would then have been impossible. But what he says about the “dissolution of the individuality of the various tonalities” could be the starting-point for an interesting discussion. In the Illrd volume of “Opera & Drama” I demonstrated that harmony becomes something real (rather than purely imaginary) only in the polyphonic symphony, i.e. in the orchestra, so that the purely imaginary individuality of tonalities (apologies to Hitzschold) must merge into the reality of the individuality of the different instruments, their manifold colouring and, finally, their style of execution. By clinging to the “individuality” of tonalities, people were clinging to a chimera which, it must be said, had earlier become just as much of a dogma with us as the Dear Lord above. On the contrary, it is the instruments themselves and, ultimately, the human voice when singing words which give a particular character to the tonality and to notes in general; thus, for ex., the characteristic individuality of a key such as E major or E flat major emerges most distinctively when played on a violin or a wind instrument, and so it would be a case of doing things by halves if I were to use a key for its own sake and thereby ignore the instrument, or, conversely, to use the instrument for its own sake alone. The instrumental musicians of the earlier century did not know this, they still proceeded on the basis of harmonic dogma: but compare their instrumentation with that of Beethoven and, finally, with mine! - The person who, in judging my music, divorces the harmony from the instrumentation does me as great an injustice as the one who divorces my music from my poem, my vocal line from the words! - Yet in all these matters I have committed the error of having communicated my theories prematurely: I still owe the world what really matters, namely the work of art which, I may add, had already matured within me before the theory was ever formulated. - [...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 143