Dearest Franz,
A kind fate has brought me another friend to stand beside me during this curious period when I must reach the final and most important decisions of my life. How comforting it is to make the acquaintance of a poet like Calderon at a mature stage of life. He has accompanied me here, too, and I have just finished reading his “Apollo and Clymene”, together with its sequel, “Phaeton”. Have you ever felt drawn towards Calderon? In my own case, my utter lack of linguistic (and musical!) talent means that he is available to me only in the form of translation. But Schlegel, Gries (the most important pieces), von der Malsburg and Martin, too, (published by Brockhaus) have all done much to open up to us the poet’s mind, and even his indescribable subtlety. I am tempted to place Calderon in a class of his own. Through him, the essential significance of the Spanish character has been revealed to me: a unique and incomparable bloom, showing such speed of development that it was soon bound to end in the destruction of matter and - in denial of the world. The fine and deeply passionate spirit of this nation has seized upon the concept of “honour” to express an idea in which all that is most noble and, at the same time, most terrifying assumes the form of a second religion. The most terrible selfishness and, at the same time, the greatest self-sacrifice seek satisfaction here. Never could the nature of the real “world” find a more sharply defined, more blinding and more commanding, but - at the same time - a more crushing and more terrifying expression than it does here. The poet’s most affecting portrayals take as their starting-point the conflict between “honour” and a deeply human sense of fellow-suffering; “honour” determines those actions which are acknowledged and praised by the world; injured fellow-feeling seeks refuge in an almost unspoken melancholy which, for that very reason, is the more deeply embracing and the more truly sublime: in it we see how terrible and how empty is the world’s true essence. It is this strangely affecting awareness that confronts us in Calderon in such enchantingly and creatively formative a way, and there is no other poet in the world to equal him in this. Now, it is the Catholic religion that seeks to bridge this deep divide, and nowhere could it achieve a more profound significance than here, where the contrast between the world and fellow-feeling assumes so clear, distinct and vivid an outline, in a way that is true of no other nation. How significant it is that almost all the great Spanish poets took holy orders during the second half of their lives. And how singular that, following their complete spiritual victory over life, these poets were then able to depict this self-same life with a certainty, purity, warmth and clarity that they never had in the hurly-burly of life; indeed, they produced their most gracious and witty creations against a background of spiritual seclusion. Faced by this wonderfully significant figure, I now find every other national literature deeply insignificant by contrast; and if nature produced only one such individual as Shakespeare among the English, we can now see how unique this poet was; indeed, the fact that the glorious English nation continues to thrive and prosper so splendidly by exploiting the world for financial gain, whereas the Spanish nation has gone to rack and ruin, this fact, I say, affects me very deeply because this phenomenon, too, clearly reveals what it is that the world regards as important! —
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Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 205