Dearest friend,
The Rhinegold is finished - : but I am finished as well!!! -
During recent weeks I have necessarily and intentionally rendered myself insensible by means of my work, and in so doing have suppressed every impulse to write to you until such time as I had completed it. This is the first morning that I can no longer find a pretext not to give vent to the wretchedness that I have nourished and restrained for so long! Let it break forth then, - I can no longer contain it! -
Apart from your (so kind!) report on the Leipzig Lohengrin, I also received one from the “Deutsche Allgemeine”, and see what a humiliating punishment I must suffer for the crime I committed against my very nature and against my innermost conscience when, two years ago, I was false to a resolve that was so necessary to me, and agreed to performances of my operas taking place! - Ah, how pure I was then, how true to myself when I had only you and Weimar in mind, and refused to hear of any other theatre, having resolved to forgo all further successes.
Well, it is too late for that now! I have broken my resolve: my pride has been humbled, and it is now a question of meekly submitting to the yoke of the Jews and the philistines!
But how shameful that in return for having sacrificed the most noble thing I own, I have not even received the reward which seemed to have been set aside for me! I still remain the beggar I was before! Dear Franz! not a year of my life has passed recently without my finding myself at least once on the very brink of a decision to end my life. Everything about it is so muddled and so hopeless! As a result of a hasty marriage at the age of 23 to a woman whom I respect but who is totally unsuited to me, I have become an outlaw for life. For a long time the common pressures of my position in life, together with my ambitious plans and wishes to escape those pressures by becoming famous, were the only thing capable of concealing from me my very real emptiness of heart. In truth, I reached the age of 36 before I became fully aware of that terrible emptiness: until then my nature was held in a state of balance between two conflicting elements of desire within me, one of which I sought to appease by means of my art, while periodically giving vent to the other by means of passionate, fantastical and sensual extravagances. (You know my Tannhäuser, this idealization of a demeanour which in reality is often quite trivial! - )
But then - in Lohengrin perhaps - I had the feeling, nay the certainty, that these two currents came together as a single unity in true love, love which I could know only through yearning but never through actual experience. God, how gladly would I have fled naked into the world and become purely and simply a happily loving and loved human being! Well - that is something I shall never again be able to be: I shall never be happy in love, but only unhappy - an “outlaw - an impossible individual”!! -
My dearest friend, - since that time my art has really been no more than of secondary interest to me, a mere makeshift, nothing more! Yet time and again it has ended up by becoming a very real makeshift, forcing me literally to make shift with it, simply in order for me to exist. But it is really only out of utter despair that I take up my art again: when this happens, and I again have to renounce reality, - if I am obliged once more to plunge into the waves of an artist’s imagination in order to find satisfaction in an imaginary world, I must at least help out my imagination and find means of encouraging my imaginative faculties. I cannot then live like a dog, I cannot sleep on straw and drink common gin: mine is an intensely irritable, acute, and hugely voracious, yet uncommonly tender and delicate sensuality which, one way or another, must be flattered if I am to accomplish the cruelly difficult task of creating in my mind a non-existent world.
- Well! once I had resumed my plans for the Nibelungs and for their actual completion, there was much that I needed to inspire in me the requisite mood of artistic sensuality: - it was necessary for me to be able to lead a better life than had recently been the case! The success of Tannhäuser (a work I had sacrificed precisely because of that hope) was now intended to help me: - I reorganized my domestic arrangements, squandered (my God - squandered!!) what money I had on every conceivable article of luxurious necessity: your visit last summer, yes - your example - everything contributed to a wilful sense of self-delusion on my part (or rather: gave me the desire for self-delusion) concerning my life. I finally stopped asking what things cost, but simply appropriated everything imaginable, everything that was in any way capable of making a favourable impression on me, or giving me a sense of well-being. The culmination of this whim came in St Moritz, in the midst of my mortification.
- My revenues seemed to be utterly infallible. In this unnatural mood of self-content, I again conceived a desire to write music. But scarcely had I returned from Paris when my situation became critical: the requests for my operas, and for Lohengrin in particular, which I had been counting on, were not forthcoming: as the year drew to a close, it became clear that I should need a very, very large sum of money if I were to survive in my nest of philistines during the weeks which were to follow. And so I considered what to do, wrote to you, and to Härtels - the latter with a view to selling the performing rights of my works; - but nothing came of it. I wrote to Berlin, to my agent there: he offered me the prospect of a good buyer whom I in turn referred to the first performance of Lohengrin in Leipzig. Well, this has now taken place: my agent informs me that it is not possible, in view of the outcome of the performance, to persuade the buyer - in spite of his great willingness - finally to buy the work. -
You must admit, it’s a real “situation” in which I now find myself! -
And this torment, distress and concern for a life that I hate, and that I curse! - and for the sake of which I make myself look ridiculous in the eyes of my house-guests, - and at the same time enjoy the wanton pleasure of having abandoned the most noble work I have so far created to the predictable stupidity of our theatre rabble and to the philistine’s scorn!
God, how do I see myself - ! If only I had the pleasure of knowing that there was someone else who knew how I see myself! -
Listen, Franz! You must help me now! Things are bad - very bad. If I am to rediscover the means to survive (and the full import of this word is not lost on me!), then something sensible must be done now that I am embarked on a course which involves the prostitution of my art, - otherwise that’s the end of it. Have you not thought any more about Berlin? something must now be achieved there if this is not to be the end of everything! -
Above all, however, I must also have money. - Härtels have been very open-handed, but of what use are hundreds when I need thousands. If the Berlin sale had come off, I could at least have used the offer of the same to convince a businessman here of my “capital”, so that he would have lent me the necessary sum over a period of three years (with repayment of a third of the sum at the end of each year). I can now say goodbye to all that. The only person who could agree to such a deal must have a private faith in my future (?) successes. Listen, my dearest Franz, you must find me such a man. Once more: I need - in order to restore me to a state of total calm and equanimity — three to four thousand thalers. My operas could very easily bring in this amount of money in three years if a real effort is now made to save Lohengrin: I shall lease my performing rights to the lender, and would relinquish every right to Tannhäuser and Lohengrin in whatever way was thought desirable or necessary. - If nobody considers me worthy of such a service - you’ll admit that things will then look very bleak indeed for me, and everything will have been self-delusion!!! - Help me to get over this - for I want to be able to survive once more. -
My dear friend, do not be angry with me! I have a just claim on you, as on my creator! You are the creator of the man I now am: I now live through you - that is no exaggeration. Take care of your creature: I call upon you to do so as a duty which you have to perform. -
You see, it is simply a question of money, there shouldn’t be any problem here. I abandon love to take its course - and art!! -
Well, the Rhinegold is finished - more finished than I thought. With what faith, with what joy did I set to work on the music! But it was in a real rage of despair that I continued the work and finally completed it: I, too, alas, learned what distress is caused by gold! Believe me, no work has ever been composed like this before: I imagine my music must be terrible; it is a morass of horrors and sublimities! -
Soon - (??) I shall prepare a fair copy: - black on white: I expect that is as far as it will go. Or perhaps I shall also have it performed in Leipzig for 20 louis d’or!
I can write no more to you today: you are the only person whom I have told this: no one else suspects it, least of all those in my immediate vicinity - !
Do not think I have suddenly been plunged into despair by the news from Leipzig. I suspected what would happen and foresaw it all. I can also imagine that the situation in Leipzig will improve, and that “things are not as bad as one thinks” - and all the usual nonsense. Perhaps: - but let me see witnesses! - I no longer have any faith, and only one hope remains: to sleep, to sleep, so deeply, so deeply - that all sensation of life’s anguish fades. I ought after all to be able to achieve that sleep: it is not so difficult. -
My God, now I’ll be causing you bad feeling, too: - what have you done to deserve that! -
The present from the Frau Kapellmeister brought a smile to my lips - a smile that in turn could have brought tears to my eyes. I shall write to her if I survive a few more days: then I shall send you my portrait with a motto which may finally succeed in embarrassing you!
- How are things otherwise? when is the wedding? Burn this letter! it is godless - but I am god-less: be thou one of God’s saints, - for I believe in no one but you: Yes, indeed! - and once again: Yes, indeed!
Yours,
R. W.
Something must come of London: I myself shall even go to America to satisfy my future creditor: I would offer to do even this in order to complete my Nibelungs.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 170