Dear Franz,
I am coming increasingly to see that you are really a great philosopher! - by contrast I often think of myself as a proper cheapjack. Apart from making - slow - progress on my music, I have now become exclusively preoccupied with a man who - albeit only in literary form - has entered my lonely life like a gift from heaven. It is Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest philosopher since Kant, whose ideas - as he himself puts it - he is the first person to think through to their logical conclusion. The German professors have - very wisely - ignored him for 40 years: he was recently rediscovered - to Germany’s shame - by an English critic. What charlatans all these Hegels etc. are beside him! His principal idea, the final denial of the will to live, is of terrible seriousness, but it is uniquely redeeming. Of course, it did not strike me as anything new, and nobody can think such a thought if he has not already lived it. But it was this philosopher who first awakened the idea in me with such clarity. When I think back on the storms that have buffeted my heart and on its convulsive efforts to cling to some hope in life - against my own better judgement - , indeed, now that these storms have swelled so often to the fury of a tempest, - I have yet found a sedative which has finally helped me to sleep at night; it is the sincere and heartfelt yearning for death: total unconsciousness, complete annihilation, the end of all dreams - the only ultimate redemption! -
How strange that I have often found your own thoughts here: although you express them differently because you are religious, I nevertheless know that you think exactly the same thing. How profound you are! In your essay on the Dutchman you often struck home with the force of lightning. When I read Schoppenhauer I was mostly in your presence: you simply did not notice. - And so I find myself growing increasingly mature: if I still toy with art, it is only as a way of passing the time. You will see from the accompanying sheet how I now seek to amuse myself. -
For the sake of young Siegfried, the fairest of my life’s dreams, I expect that I must still complete the Nibelung pieces: the Valkyrie has exhausted me too much for me to begrudge myself this relaxation; I have now reached the second half of the last act. But it will be 1856 before I have completed the whole thing, and 1858, the tenth year of my hegira, before I can perform it, - if fate so decrees. But since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love, I intend to erect a further monument to this most beautiful of dreams, a monument in which this love will be properly sated from beginning to end: I have planned in my head a Tristan and Isolde, the simplest, but most full-blooded musical conception; with the “black flag” which flutters at the end, I shall then cover myself over, in order - to die. -
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 177