A thousand thanks to you, best of friends, for your recent letter! Unfortunately, I cannot respond to it in the way I should like: my cerebral nerves are again causing me so much pain that for some time now I have been instructed to give up reading and writing - I might almost say all intellectual life! Even the briefest letter exhausts me dreadfully, and only a complete rest can - or could - really restore me to health (but where and how shall I find it?). - This is not intended as a complaint, but simply as an explanation of why it is that, in all that I have to tell you today, I shall be short and to the point, and stick only to essentials. Do not, therefore, be angry with me if I do not write to you with the cheerful circumstantiality with which I generally seek to make amends for the impossibility of our personal dealings. -
I am still not entirely clear as to how things stand with Berlin: Hülsen regards my demand as a vote of no-confidence in his personal opinion; I had to disabuse him of this error by burdening his conscience with the assurance that I have the most unquestioning faith in him. I now ask no more from him than that he proves by means of a few well-chosen words that he is perfectly aware of the difficult situation in which I find myself with regard to Tannhäuser in Berlin, and that he undertakes to perform the work with the firm intention of overcoming this same difficult situation. I shall then leave him to deal with the whole question of my fee. - Something at least has served to reassure me in recent weeks: I drew up a fairly detailed set of instructions for performing Tannhäuser, and had it printed, and have sent sufficient copies of the brochure to all the theatres which have ordered copies of the full score. I hope it will be of some use. I am enclosing half a dozen copies herewith. The piece will not contain much that is new to you, since I have already conveyed most of its contents to you by letter: yet you may find it useful in supporting you in your plans to mount a new production of Tannhäuser, especially if you communicate its contents to the producer and singers. That was really what I wanted to ask of you. (I might add that, as always, it was a perfect torment for me to have to write this piece! this endless correspondence with printers is dreadful, the more so when what is at issue is something whose significance I have long since outgrown! Indeed, if I still concern myself with my earlier operas, it is simply because of force of circumstances, certainly not because of any inclination on my part to make reparations for the past.)
This brings me on to Berlioz and Raff. To be frank, it saddens me that Berlioz is still intending to revise his Cellini, or rather that he has to do so at all! If I am not mistaken, the work is over 12 years old: has Berlioz not developed in the mean time, in order to produce something quite new now? What pitiful self-confidence if he now has to go back to so comparatively early a work. Bülow is quite right in his assessment of what it is that is wrong with Cellini: it is the poem, and the unnatural position which the musician was driven to adopt in his attempt to cover up a shortcoming by purely musical means - a shortcoming which the poet alone can make good. Berlioz will simply never be able to improve Cellini: but who is worth more, Cellini - or Berlioz? Abandon the former, and throw your weight behind the latter! For me, there is something quite gruesome about having to stand by and observe these galvanizing attempts at resuscitation! For heaven’s sake, let Berlioz write a new opera; it will be his supreme misfortune if he does not, for there is one thing alone that can save him: drama, just as there is one thing alone that will drag him further and further down, his obstinate avoidance of this uniquely valid expedient, - and this view of mine is only confirmed by his renewed preoccupation with an earlier work in which it was precisely the poet who let him down and whom he keeps on trying to replace by means of his music. Believe me, - I like Berlioz, even though he distrustfully and obstinately refuses to come near me: he does not know me, - but I know him. If I expect anything of anyone, it is of Berlioz: but not on the road which led him to the insipidities of his Faust symphony, - for if he continues along this road, he is bound to end up looking utterly ridiculous. If ever a musician needed a poet, it is Berlioz, and it is his misfortune that he always adapts his poet according to his own musical whim, arranging now Shakespeare, now Göthe, to suit his own purpose. He needs a poet to fill him through and through, a poet who is driven by ecstasy to violate him, and who is to him what man is to woman. It is with dismay that I see this incomparably gifted artist destroyed by his own egotistical solitude. Can I help him?? - You do not want Wiland: I consider it a beautiful poem, but for my own part I can no longer complete it. Do you wish to offer it to Berlioz? Henri Blaze might be the man to adapt it into French, do you think? -
How are things with Raff? I believe he is working on a new piece? No, he is arranging an old one! Do people really have no life left in them? What can an artist use to create his works if it is not life itself? Yet surely this life is only artistically productive if it drives the artist to create new works of art as a reflection of life? Is this artificial reworking of old moments in an artist’s life really to be regarded as artistic creation? What becomes of the well-spring of our art if the new does not gush forth so irresistibly that the old is lost without trace, or else is entirely subsumed by new creations? O ye people of God, do not confuse making art with creating it! What complacency and, at the same time, what poverty is not made manifest by this desire to touch up earlier efforts! If Raff’s opera met with the success that you say it did, he should be pleased, at least he was better rewarded than I for my “Fairies”, which I did not even have performed, or for my “Ban on Love”, which witnessed only a single ghastly performance, or for my “Rienzi”, which so little occupies my thoughts at present that I should not allow it to be revived, even if such a performance were to be planned. It is only reluctantly that I trouble myself with the Dutchman, with Tannhäuser and with Lohengrin, - if I do so at all, it is simply because I know that - as a result of imperfect performances - they have still not been perfectly understood: if they had already received their due, the devil himself knows I should not ask any more about things I’ve outgrown. - Children! create something new! something new! and again something new! - if you cling to the past, the devil of uncreativity will claim you for his own, and you will be the most melancholy of artists!
Well, I’ve got that off my chest! Whoever accuses me of insincerity must answer for it before God; but whoever accuses me of arrogance is a stupid fool! -
I can write no more! Do not be angry with me! my head is fit to burst! - Let me briefly bid you the fondest farewell that I have in my heart; remain true to me, and write to me soon.
Yours,
Richard W.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 149