My very dear Hans,
Many thanks for your letters, and more especially for your enclosures. Your works have occupied and stimulated me a good deal: but from the moment of my first acquaintance with them I found myself in the difficult position of knowing that you expect me to pass judgement on them, which is something I cannot possibly do. In the first place, how am I to arrive at a clear idea of the thing? You know how notoriously badly I play the piano and that I am incapable of mastering anything unless I already have a clear idea of it; and that, in comparison to what I demand of a work, what I can pick up simply by looking at it is not enough to give me any proper conception of it. [...]
But if I am to pass judgement on what, in my naive way, I believe I have managed to make sense of, you will have to make do with the following purely personal opinion. -
I was immediately struck by your inventiveness: you have an unmistakable gift here, which reveals itself above all in the more recent composition, the orchestral Fantasy. In both design and execution, the thematic structure is imposing and clear, and especially in the Fantasy is really quite novel, inasmuch as it emerges entirely from the subject. The characterization of the motifs is clear, although not as decisively so in the Caesar Overture as in the Fantasy: without being merely wilful, I cannot decide - at least on the basis of a single meagre impression - whether all the motifs can be related to specific objects, but no doubt the subject-matter is to blame for this, for it must be said that it does not exactly lend itself to such treatment; indeed, it even seems to me to have contributed to the fact that the themes appear less original - i.e. always eloquent - in the way you have formed them: thus the main theme in the brass, for ex., does not strike me as being in any way remarkable, but seems rather bombastic, after the fashion in which composers regularly write when they are not really sure what to make of a given poetic motif. The situation is quite different - and advantageously so - in the Fantasy: here you were more sure of yourself, and if ever a piece had atmosphere, this is it; that it is a quite dreadful atmosphere is a different matter. You are certainly much more independent in this work, everything about it is unmistakable. But in both pieces I admire your technique where, as regards difficulties of form both in detail and in the overall design, it would - in my opinion - be hard to surpass you. I cannot deny your mastery, indeed, I believe you could accomplish anything you set out to achieve. If, conversely, I have any serious reservations - as regards the rules - they concern your attitude towards harmonic euphony: I confess that the only impression I have been able to form here is that of highly meaningful music performed on instruments that are out of tune, for it is precisely here that I most look for the determinative sensuous impression of an outstanding performance before I can rid myself of the fear that now besets me. I know only too well from experience that there are objects which can be depicted in music but which can be expressed only if the composer invents harmonies that will grate upon the ear of the musical philistine. But, having recognized this in the course of my own compositions, I nevertheless found myself constantly guided by a quite specific instinct which led me to conceal the harmonic dissonances as much as possible and finally to place them in such a way that (to my own mind) they were finally no longer felt as such. Now, I cannot avoid the feeling that you yourself have adopted an almost opposite approach, in other words you believe it is important that the dissonance be felt as a dissonance, and the worst example of this seems to me where all your powers of invention are concentrated upon expressing just such a dissonance. Whether or not you think me a philistine, I must confess that on no account would I care to have written, for ex., [music example] at the end of the Fantasy, simply because it is a cheap effect: and what you hope to achieve with the D♮ in [music example] - except to make people think it is a wrong note - I simply cannot imagine. I have used all my ingenuity in an attempt to reconcile myself to this [music example] because I saw how much importance you attach to it: and there were moments when I succeeded in doing so, especially when I was able to picture in my mind a feeling of suicidal madness. But it did not last long, and I soon fell back into my old weakness of believing that art consists precisely in communicating the strangest and most unusual feelings to a listener in such a way that his attention is not distracted by the material that he is listening to, but that he yields unresistingly, as it were, to an ingratiating allurement and thus involuntarily assimilates even what is most alien to his nature. -
You see, Hans, I have been through similar experiences myself during my earliest period as a composer, when I regarded everything as being of secondary importance to the discovery of some such harmonic joke. At that time I could do nothing properly and would certainly not have been capable of writing a piece of music that was as well-constructed and that attested to such mastery as does your Fantasy. But in your own case it astonishes me: certainly, you are mistaken about yourself, you are far too inventive to take any serious pleasure in such antics.
You see, there is something typically Jewish about the cold and indifferent way in which others invariably pay heed only to what is different about the things we have to tell them, and about the way they talk to us as though what really mattered did not exist. -
You see what a low opinion I have of all this, and how I am convinced that my objection to your works touches on only inessential points, and not on the essential ones. And so you should regard my verdict - although I refuse to have it seen as such - as entirely favourable to you. I do not recall ever having been so deeply affected in my mood by a recent piece of music, in spite of my comparative ignorance of the field, as was the case with your Fantasy. - Have you heard it yourself? You do not say so. -
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 176