Allow me, best of men, to begin by expressing my amazement at your immense creativity! So you are planning a Dante Symphony? And you hope to show it to me, already completed, this autumn? Do not take it amiss if I sound amazed at this marvel. When I look back on your activities during recent years, you strike me as being quite superhuman! there must indeed be something quite unique about it. But it is entirely natural that we should find pleasure only in creative work, indeed only in that way can we make life at all tolerable: only when we create do we become what we really are, all the other vital functions are quite meaningless for us and are basically only concessions to the vulgarity of everyday human existence, concessions which always leave us with a feeling of disquiet. All that I at least still hope for in this world is a whim and the right frame of mind to be able to work: and how difficult it is for me to preserve these moods when beset by such vulgarity. It is entirely the same with you: but what amazes me in your case is that you are so creative, so that I always see you in an enviable light. -
And so - a “Divina Comedia”? It is certainly a most splendid idea, and I am already looking forward to enjoying your music. But I must discuss certain details of it with you. That the “Inferno” and “Purgatorio” will be a success I do not doubt for a moment: but I have misgivings about the “Paradiso”, and you yourself confirm these misgivings when you tell me that you are planning to include choruses in the work. In the Ninth Symphony (as a work of art), it is the last movement with its chorus which is without doubt the weakest section, it is important only from the point of view of the history of art since it reveals to us, in its very naive way, the embarrassment felt by a real tone-poet who (after Hell and Purgatory) does not know how finally to represent Paradise. And indeed, my dearest Franz, there is a considerable difficulty with this “Paradise”, and if there is anyone who can confirm this for us, it is - remarkably enough - Dante himself, the singer of a Paradiso which I have no doubt is similarly the weakest part of his Divine Comedy. I have followed Dante through Hell and Purgatory with the deepest fellow-feeling; having emerged from the pit of hell, I washed myself with fervent emotion, together with the poet, at the foot of Mount Purgatory - in the waters of the sea, I then savoured the divine morn, the pure air, rose up from one cornice to the next, mortified one passion after another, struggled to subdue my wild instinct for survival, until I finally stood before the flames, abandoned my final wish to live and threw myself into the fiery glow in order that, sinking into rapt contemplation of Beatrice, I might cast aside my entire personality, devoid of will. But that I was roused once more from this ultimate self-liberation in order, basically, to revert to being what I had been before, simply in order that, on the basis of the most laboured sophisms unworthy of a great mind, and of what I can call only the most infantile inventions, the Catholic doctrine of a God who, for his own self-glorification, has created the existential hell that I have had to suffer should be confirmed in this highly problematical and, for my own part, utterly unacceptable way - this has left me feeling very unsatisfied. In order to do justice to Dante (as with Beethoven), I had to revert to an historical standpoint; I had to imagine myself living at the time of Dante and bear in mind the actual aim of his poem, which clearly sets out to produce a specific effect upon his contemporaries, and in particular upon Church reform; I was forced to admit that in this sense he had the uncommon knack of expressing generally valid, popular ideas with unfailing accuracy, and where I most agreed with him was in his praise of those saints who voluntarily chose a life of poverty. And even in his sophistry I was forced to admire his profound poetic imagination and power of presentation (just as I admire Beethoven’s musical skill in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony); I was finally forced to feel the most profound and sublime emotion by virtue of his splendidly inspired idea of turning his childhood sweetheart Beatrice into the figure in whom divine teachings are revealed to him, and, inasmuch as this teaching is designed to encourage the emancipation of personal egoism through love, I am delighted to acknowledge this teaching of Beatrice. But the fact that Beatrice emerges from a car in a Church pageant and, instead of offering us this pure and simple teaching, makes an ostentatious display of all the subtleties of Church scholasticism - this, in spite of the poet’s assurances that she grows increasingly radiant and glowing, makes me regard her as increasingly cold and, finally, as an object of such indifference that, as a plain reader, I may well acknowledge that Dante proceeds here entirely in accordance with his own age and his own aims, but, as a sympathetic fellow-poet, I wish that I could have lost my private consciousness, and hence consciousness in general, in that refining fire, for, had I done so, I should have felt undeniably better than I do in the company of a Catholic God, even if Dante portrays Him with the same degree of skill as you yourself will no doubt show in attempting to celebrate Him in your choruses.
What I am offering you here is simply an accurate reflection of the impression which the Divine Comedy has had upon me, since, in the “Paradiso”, the poem seems to me to amount to no more than a “divine comedy” which is ruined for me both as a participant and as a spectator. The really perplexing problem among all these other questions is always how, in this terrible world of ours, beyond which there is only nothingness, it might be possible to infer the existence of a God who would make life’s immense sufferings merely something apparent, while the redemption we long for is seen as something entirely real that may be consciously enjoyed. This may not be a problem for philistines - especially for the English variety: the reason they get on so splendidly with their God is because they enter into a contract with Him, according to whose terms they have to fulfil a certain number of contractual points, so that, finally, as a reward for various shortcomings in this world, they may enjoy eternal bliss in the world to come. But what do we have in common with such vulgar ideas? - You once told me your views on human nature, which were that mankind was “une intelligence, servie par des organes”. If that were so, the overwhelming majority of people would be very badly off, having only “organs” but as good as no “intelligence” (at least in your sense of the word). I, on the other hand, see the question in a different light; it is like this: man (like any other animal) is a will to live; his organs are created to meet various needs, and one of these organs is his intellect, i.e. the organ for comprehending whatever is external to it, with the aim of using such objects to satisfy life’s need, according to its strength and ability. A normal man is therefore one in whom this organ - which is directed outwards and whose function is to perceive things, just as the stomach’s function is to digest food - is equipped with sufficient ability to satisfy a need that is external to it, and - for the normal person - this need is exactly the same as that of the most common beast, namely the instinct to eat and to reproduce; for this will to live, which is the actual metaphysical basis of all existence, demands solely to live, i.e. to eat and reproduce itself perpetually, and this tendency is demonstrably one and the same whether it be found in the dull rock, in the more delicate plant, or, finally, in the human animal; the only difference lies in the organs which man, having reached the higher stages of his objectification, must use in order to satisfy more complicated needs which, for that reason, are increasingly contested and harder to meet. Once we have gained this insight (and it is an insight which has been confirmed by the tremendous findings of modern science), we shall suddenly understand what it is that is characteristic about the lives of by far the greater part of mankind of all ages, and we shall no longer be surprised if we always think of them as beasts: for this is the normal human condition. But just as the vast majority of people remain below this norm, inasmuch as their complex cognitive organ is not even developed to the point where it can adequately meet their normal needs, so we also find (albeit only rarely, of course) abnormal individuals in whom the cognitive organ, i.e. the brain, has evolved beyond the ordinary and adequate level of development found in the rest of humanity, just as nature, after all, often creates monsters in which one organ is much more developed than any other. Such a monstrosity - if it reaches its highest level of development - is genius, which essentially rests upon no more than an abnormally fertile and capacious brain. This cognitive organ, which originally and in normal circumstances looks beyond itself in order to meet the needs of the will to live, gains such lively and fascinating impressions from outside - in the case, that is, of abnormal development - that there are times when it breaks free from its role of serving the will - which had after all created it solely for that purpose - and is thus able to perceive the world undistorted by the will, i.e. aesthetically; the objects of the world of external phenomena are thus seen undistorted by the will and are its ideal images, which it is the artist’s task to capture and set down, as it were. In the case of a strong individual, his interest in the world of external phenomena is necessarily encouraged by this act of observation, and it grows to the point where he permanently forgets the original needs of his own personal will, in other words he begins to sympathize with the things outside him, and he does so for their own sake and not because of any personal interest in them. The question must then be asked what we see in this abnormal state, and whether our sympathy can be regarded as participating in the joy of others or, rather, in their suffering? The answer to this question is provided by the true geniuses and the true saints of all ages, who tell us that they have seen only suffering and felt only fellow-suffering. In other words, they have recognized the normal condition of all living things and seen the cruel, eternally contradictory nature of the will to live, which is common to all living things and which, in eternal self-mutilation, is blindly self-regarding; the appalling cruelty of this will, which even in sexual love wills only its own reproduction, first appeared here reflected in that particular cognitive organ which, in its normal state, recognized itself as having been created by the will and therefore as being subservient to it; and so, in its abnormal, sympathetic state, it developed to the point of seeking lasting and, finally, permanent freedom from its shameful servitude, a freedom which it ultimately achieved only by means of a complete denial of the will to live.
This act of denying the will is the true action of the saint: that it is ultimately accomplished only in a total end to individual consciousness - for there is no other consciousness except that which is personal and individual - was lost sight of by the naive saints of Christianity, confused, as they were, by Jewish dogma, and they were able to deceive their confused imagination by seeing that longed-for state as a perpetual continuation of a new state of life freed from nature, without our judgement as to the moral significance of their renunciation being impaired in the process, since in truth they were striving only to achieve the destruction of their own individuality, i.e. - their existence. This most profound of all instincts finds purer and more meaningful expression in the oldest and most sacred religion known to man, in Brahman teaching, and especially in its final transfiguration in Buddhism, where it achieves its most perfect form. Admittedly, it puts forward a myth in which the world is created by God; but it does not praise this act as a boon, but presents it as a sin committed by Brahma for which the latter atones by transforming himself into the world and by taking upon himself the immense sufferings of the world; he is redeemed in those saints who, by totally denying the will to live, pass over into “nirvana”, i.e. the land of non-being, as a result of their consuming sympathy for all that suffers. The Buddha was just such a saint; according to his doctrine of metempsychosis, every living creature will be reborn in the shape of that being to which he caused pain, however pure his life may otherwise have been, so that he himself may learn to know pain; his suffering soul continues to migrate in this way, and he himself continues to be reborn until such time as he causes no more pain to any living creature in the course of some new incarnation but, out of fellow-suffering, completely denies himself and his own will to live. - How sublime and uniquely satisfying is this teaching in contrast to the Christian-Judaic dogma according to which each human being - for in this case, of course, the suffering beast exists only to serve man!! - merely has to behave himself in the eyes of the Church throughout the short space of his life on earth, in order to lead an extremely easy life for the rest of eternity, whereas those who have not followed the teachings of the Church in this brief life will suffer equally eternal torment as a result! - We may allow that Christianity is such a contradictory phenomenon because we know it only through its contamination by narrow-minded Judaism and through its resultant distortion, whereas modern research has succeeded in proving that pure, uncontaminated Christianity is no more and no less than a branch of that venerable Buddhist religion which, following Alexander’s Indian campaign, found its way, among other places, to the shores of the Mediterranean. In early Christianity we can still see clear traces of a total denial of the will to live, and a longing for the end of the world, i.e. the cessation of all life. The unfortunate part about it, however, is that such profound insights into the nature of things are vouchsafed only to those individuals who are totally abnormal in the sense described above, as a result of which they can be fully understood by them and by them alone; in order to convey these insights to others, the sublime founders of the world’s religions must therefore speak in such images as are accessible to people’s ordinary - normal - powers of comprehension; whereas much is distorted in this way (although the Buddha’s teaching relating to the transmigration of souls almost certainly expresses the truth), the vulgarity and licentiousness of general egoism that characterizes normal people means that, in the end, the image is necessarily distorted to the point of grotesqueness, and - I feel sorry for the poet who takes it upon himself to restore this grotesque distortion to its original form. It seems to me that Dante, especially in the Paradiso, has not entirely succeeded in this: in his account of the divine natures he often strikes me at least like a childish Jesuit. But you, my worthy friend, may have more success here, and since you are planning to depict this image in music, I can almost predict your success in advance, since music is the real artistic original likeness of the world itself, for those who are initiated into its mysteries no error is possible here. Only for the Paradiso, and especially for the choruses, do I feel a friendly concern. - You will, I trust, excuse me from adding anything of comparative insignificance to these somewhat weighty considerations?
I shall write again soon: I leave here on the 26th, and that knowledge will help me to last out until then! -
Fare you well, my dear dear Franz.
Yours,
R. W.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 187