[...] My dearest friend, give up your attempts to make me “independent”; as long as I live I shall remain a knave - at least in the sense that the English understand the term - so that my only hope is that no one is dependent upon me, since anyone who depends on me will not escape so easily. But that’s how it is. However, I may soon abandon my art, and then all will be well. It is this alone that encourages periods of self-delusion which in the long term can have only serious repercussions for me. There are times when it induces in me a sense of frivolity, and you know that frivolity never did anyone any good, least of all the person who abandoned himself to it. But there is no doubt about it - it will take very little to bring me to the point of putting a final stop to this source of all my life’s folly: I have reason enough to do so; the pain which my art has caused me far outweighs the rare pleasures that it offers. It requires very little, indeed, a single event, and I shall abandon this game as well: - then - I shall no doubt do so, albeit in other ways than most people would have expected. -
I visited Herr Benecke in the City: the day after tomorrow his driver will collect me and take me to his home outside the town. At all events it was a very good letter of introduction which you gave me. In fact, he and his family belong to the Times faction, in musical matters, too: his wife is a relation of Mendelssohn’s, whose rival people now consider me to be, in spite of the fact that they all assure me that they have never heard his Hebrides Overture as well played as conducted by me. I may add that the Beneckes are also famous here as a wealthy and art(?)loving household. We shall see. But I am certainly grateful to you for your kind thought.
Apart from this, my favourite London acquaintance up until now has been the first violinist here, Sainton, a native of Toulouse, passionate by nature, kind-hearted and amiable. He alone is the reason for my having been invited to London. He has been living here for several years with a German by the name of Lüders, with whom he is on terms of the most intimate friendship; the latter had read my aesthetic writings and been so prejudiced in my favour as a result that he told Sainton all about them, as best he could, whereupon the two of them concluded that I must be a splendid fellow; and so, when Sainton proposed my name to the directors and was asked to explain how he knew me, he told them a lie, and said he had seen me conduct, since - as he explained to me - these people would never have understood his real reason for believing in me as he did. At the end of the first rehearsal, when Sainton embraced me in his enchantment, I could not help but call him a “téméraire” who should count himself lucky that, on this occasion at least, he had not made a fool of himself. I like this man very much. Yesterday, after the rehearsal, when he saw how exhausted and out of humour I was, he did not balk at driving home with me and waiting until I had changed, whereupon he cancelled the meal I had ordered to be served in my rooms, and took me back to his own house, where I dined en garçon, in the most pleasant surroundings, with him and Lüders, until I felt somewhat better disposed. -
Such a man as he, in London, among the English, is a perfect oasis in the desert: by contrast, I find it impossible to imagine anything more repugnant than the real genuine Englishman; without exception they are all like sheep, and the Englishman’s practical intelligence is about as reliable as a sheep’s instinct for finding its food in the open fields; of course, it finds its food, but the whole of the beautiful fields and the blue sky above might as well not exist, such are its organs of perception. How unhappy, by contrast, must a man feel who sees only the fields and the sky but finds it hard to make out the yarrow! -
I have also taken a great liking to a young musician whom Liszt recommended, a man by the name of Klindworth: if the man had a tenor voice, I’d not shrink from abducting him; he’s got everything else, especially the physical appearance, that it takes to be Siegfried. - I may add that I now have a fine Erard grand piano in the house: I had to have a writing desk specially built by a carpenter; it was impossible to obtain one otherwise. And so I am now all set up for work, and have been so for some days now; but I have little to show for it; the interruption that I suffered was both long and violent: to begin with, my work felt utterly alien. Let’s hope I can find my way back to it again: - or shall I abandon it altogether? -
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 182