I am most sincerely grateful to you, my dearest Franz, for your kind letter, for which I had been waiting for some considerable time. The prospect which you hold out to me of finally visiting me again in September is the only glimmer of hope to lighten the darkness of this sad year. I am living here like a damned soul in hell. I did not think I should ever again be obliged to sink so low! I cannot begin to describe what a wretched opinion I have of myself for putting up with such appalling conditions, and I realize that it was an absolute sin, a crime, to accept this London engagement which, however well things had turned out, could only have led me further away than ever from my true course. There is certainly no need for me to open my heart to you and tell you at length about my position here: it is the logical outcome of an act of the greatest illogicality which I have ever committed. It has reduced me to the point of having to conduct an English concert programme (!): that says it all! I have stepped right into a morass of etiquette and custom and am in it up to my ears, unable to channel even a drop of fresh water in my direction in order to revive myself. “Sir, we are not used to that sort of thing here”, - that is all I ever hear, perpetually echoed back at me! - Not even the orchestra can offer me any compensation: it consists almost entirely of Englishmen, i.e. skilled machines whom I can never really get going: trade and business stifle every other emotion. Added to this is a public which - I am generally assured - is very well-disposed towards me but which can never be drawn out of itself: it sits through the most moving music as it does through the most boring, without ever betraying the fact that it has received any real impression. And then there is this ridiculous Mendelssohn-cult, the whole brazen hypocrisy of this absurd nation.
- But even if things were not as bad as they are, - what am I doing here conducting concerts such as these? It is no business of mine to be here! It is something entirely different if now and again I perform a Beethoven symphony for some of my friends: but to be a formally appointed concert conductor who has the scores of concert items etc. sent to him at his home so that he can beat time to them - this is something that is bound to fill me with the most profound sense of shame! In fact, it was this awareness of the total unsuitability of my appointment which, at the end of the 4th concert, finally forced upon me the decision to demand that I be released from my contract. Of course, I was immediately dissuaded from doing so, and it was principally out of consideration for my wife, who would have received the news of my sudden departure from London, and all that would have been written about it, with utter dismay, that I resolved to stick it out until the final concert. But what hellish torment this means for me, I can scarcely tell you: all desire for work is fast fading away, I had intended finishing the score of the “Valkyrie” during the four months I am here, but there is no longer any question of that now; I shall not even finish the second act, so dreadfully dispiriting is the whole of this burdensome situation. In July I intended beginning Young Siegfried on the Seelisberg by the shores of Lake Lucerne; but I am already thinking of postponing this start until next spring! -
This disinclination for work is the worst part of it all: I feel as though eternal night were closing in on me as a result: for what else is there for me to do in the world if I cannot work?
- I am being accompanied throughout this hell by “Dante”, a work I had never previously got round to reading. I have passed through his Inferno, and now find myself at the gates of Purgatory. In truth, I have need of this Purgatory: for, if I consider the matter aright, it was an act of truly sinful frivolity which brought me to London, an act for which I must now fervently atone. I must be resigned, indeed I must: this knowledge led me long ago to admit the necessity of resignation - in its widest sense; but I still have to overcome this wild and terrible instinct for survival which continues to cloud my vision and to cast me into a chaos of contradictions. And so I hope one day to pass from Purgatory into Paradise: the fresh clear air of my Seelisberg may perhaps help me to do so. I do not deny that I would be happy to find my Beatrice there!
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 186