Your letter, my dear Frau Kapellmeister, was almost a source of embarrassment to me on this occasion, for, having sent me this reminder, you will certainly not believe me when I assure you that I would have written to you today in any case, and of my own free will. But because of your kindness you have robbed me of even this one slight reward which I should otherwise have merited by having finally written to you without being asked; for - I have no doubt that you will not believe my assurance, eager though you are to believe most things. Very well then, let this, too, be an exercise in humility! -
Yes indeed, my dear, kind friend! You would have received a letter from me today in any case; not because I had anything to report, but precisely because I wanted to tell you that nothing happens in my life any longer; and I should then have done so after my own fashion, and managed to turn it into a letter for you, - a letter of the kind that I have been wanting to write to you for quite some time. In fact, I could also say that I needed only to tell you why I have not written for so long; in that way I should have finished up at more or less the same point, and you would have discovered more about me than it is good for my friends to know. I was extremely relieved to have you write and tell me about the concert at the Wesendoncks’, since I discovered in that way that you already knew about it, and because I can imagine that I could easily have omitted to say a single word to you about it - but to have done so entirely unpremeditatedly and without intending to convey anything particular in the process. At all events, the brilliant report which reached you - perhaps from Herwegh’s pen - absolves me from offering you any further description of the event, so that, in informing you of my news, I may confine myself to the otherwise uneventful nature of my life. All that goes on in the world is of no particular appeal to me; the more intimate side of life - which is all that people like us are concerned about any longer - is always lost sight of here; the more people I show my face to, the less I am understood. In public it is only the mask that counts, for even if one were to appear before them without a mask, people would still see it as a mask, since this is all they have ever known. What increasingly attracts me to great poets is what they conceal by their silence rather than what they express, indeed, it is almost more from a poet’s silence than from what he says that I learn to acknowledge his greatness: and it is this that makes Calderon so great and so precious for me. What makes me love music with such inexpressible joy is that it conceals everything, while expressing what is least imaginable: it is thus, strictly speaking, the only true art, the other arts being merely adjuncts. What I concealed that evening I revealed to the assembled guests in loud and sonorous tones by means of my Beethoven: you have been told that it was not my silence that was understood but only the sounds that I made. And you wish me well for this feast of sound, just as the whole of the world rejoiced in it. And so all I should now need to tell you is what I concealed: but it will be far from easy to do so. Let us attempt to explain this by means of similes! What an absurd word - : similes! What did I want to express by using it? There it is on the written page: let it stand; you yourself must think of the most sensible interpretation here! -
And so I shall tell you a little of how I felt before and after this concert.
About 2 weeks before these celebrations I had come to the point where I was ready to grab my hat at the first opportunity and set out into the world, intending to disappear for ever from the sight of a certain three people. This seemed to me the only solution to a situation which had grown to be utterly intolerable. What held me back? - the realization that to have done so would have been the death of one at least of these three people, and perhaps of all three of us. And one recoils from being the cause of so sudden a death in others, even though, for oneself, it must appear the ultimate boon. - I remained. It was then, as you know, that I brought off a really first-rate concert. However, this brilliantly festive and cheerful occasion left me feeling somewhat exhausted; I fell ill, and was annoyed at not being able to write to you about it immediately, since, with the best will in the world, I could not have done so, a fever of several days’ duration having left me somewhat weak. And on the very day that I was first able to go out into the fresh air again, my dear wife fell prey to a temptation of the devil’s which I sincerely hope she may one day come to see as a test that God has set her. What made this incident particularly painful for me was that for some time now the poor woman has been suffering from a serious relapse of an illness dating back some considerable time.
The enjoyment afforded by our tiny garden and her preoccupation with it, together with the pleasures of our new-found domesticity, had done her a power of good last summer, and her terribly excited state, involving, as it did, often lengthy periods when she could not breathe and all kinds of other worrying symptoms which had become increasingly noticeable over the years, seemed to have disappeared altogether. During the second half of this last winter, however, her illness suddenly returned, and (you may be assured) entirely without any obvious outside cause (for she knew nothing of that catastrophe), indeed, it did so with such violence and forcefulness that these last few months have been absolute hell for the two of us. Heart ailments of this kind typically express themselves in permanent insomnia in particular, and in a terrible excitability, in violence, melancholy, oversensitivity, a fanciful determination to take everything amiss, and often total confusion when it comes to rational thinking and thought. All the remedies which the doctor has tried have so far led only to a worsening of the problem, and since I was so pleased with the results of the treatment which I received at the time with Dr Vaillant outside Geneva, I finally attempted to persuade my poor wife to undertake a similar course of treatment for herself. Fortunately, a friend was able to draw my attention to a hydropathic establishment very near Zurich, run by an excellent doctor who has already been successful in treating a notorious case entirely similar to my wife’s (only more critical). We paid a call together on this doctor two days ago, and both of us immediately felt total trust in him, and my poor tormented wife is now resolved to begin her treatment in Brestenberg the day after tomorrow. This marks a temporary halt in the increasing decline from which I am suffering. I shall be on my own for some time - a good two months no doubt - and shall at least have peace and quiet at home, in addition, I hope, to having the leisure to work. During this time my wife’s illness will reach a turning-point: I am fully confident, and have every hope that she will find complete relief from her suffering. How happy I should be if she were to enable me to devote to her what I can sacrifice to her future welfare and the peace and quiet of her declining years! But you must not be angry with me, my dear Frau Kapellmeister, if it is not until today that I have finally found time to write to you. -
I shall shake friend Wesendonck’s hand for you, but shall take good care not to convey your real meaning to him when I do so; it might easily confuse him to discover that people had too high an opinion of him. He is very good-natured; but his behaviour - which in many respects is thoroughly respectable - no doubt rests for the most part simply upon the fact that he is at his wits’ end. He is quite incapable of rising to the level of true, manly resignation. He stands in awe of me, and feels profound respect; indeed, he often shows me the most loving affection. None the less, the crux of my dealings with him remains the fact that there is nothing for which he can ever reproach me. With what sacrifices this has had to be achieved, not only on my part but, more especially, on the part of his wife, you can well enough imagine. She is fading away, and is kept alive only by the sight of me. And yet on that festive evening we were able and, indeed, obliged to admit to each other that there was no one else with whom we would wish to change places. Consciousness of our suffering is the source of our solace. -
I have again been thinking a great deal about my amnesty of late; it alone could make our position substantially easier to bear. Trips to Germany, periodic artistic ventures would offer a worthy diversion, and appease the canker that eats away inside me. I tried to do something about it recently in Dresden; but, as it appears so far, once again without success. No doubt my cup must be drunk to the bitter dregs. May heaven grant me a noble end! Amen! -
I am making slow progress on my work. I have signed a contract with Härtels for publishing “Tristan” in return for very slight financial advantages; the full score is to be engraved, and, in order to make a start, I have begun by scoring the first act. I finally intended to start the second act at the beginning of this month but it was impossible to do any work. I hope I shall soon be able to get back to it. - By the way, the rumour that I was writing my new opera for a first performance in Prague was so stupid as not to need refuting; it rested upon the fact that a certain theatre director was giving himself airs, having thought that he could interpret a jocular remark of mine in this way. - For the rest, dearest of friends, things are as wretched as ever with me. But I mention this too only in passing! -
And so, you now have a whole bundle of good news from me, including some in advance, so that none of you shall forestall me with anything better. I am following Liszt’s campaigns step by step in the musical journals; I am genuinely pleased for his sake but for a long time now I have felt so utterly remote from the feeling that guides him that I can regard it all only as though it were a dream; there is no firm reality about it for me, and I do not know, when I look at Franz, whether he is in the light and I in the shadow, or the other way round. It all strikes me as an insubstantial and inaudible play of shadowy figures whose once clear outlines grow gradually more and more indistinguishable. But you are standing in the midst of the fire, and for you the world’s approval is a fixed and tangible reality which does you good. I no longer have any feeling for it, and so you must not regard it as a lack of interest on my part if I do not announce my pleasure at Liszt’s triumphant successes in more energetic terms than these; my voice fails me, like that of the man who tries to speak in a dream to the phantoms of his dreams.
Nor will the announcement of your future visit assume the form of a genuine hope for me yet: you know I have no faith, but only courage. You must instruct me, unbeliever that I am: however, I need to be with you face to face, for that to be possible. But, if I may make a confession, I am resolved to hope. -
And now a thousand sincere thanks for your generous, unshakeably loyal friendship! Never think of me as ungrateful, but only as unhappy; never as despairing but only as resigned! And give Marie my very best wishes! My dear friend, if you were able to send her to Zurich in advance, as a pledge of your own intending visit, you would be doing us a tremendous service. She could live very comfortably at the Wesendoncks’, and what she would be to us is something I doubtless have no need to intimate! After all, you are great and unusual in all that you think and do. Do something unusual, for what is at issue is out of the ordinary! - But enough of this, too! I know that unusual things happen to me only as a part of the most painful crown of thorns that adorns my brow; I am not fated to enjoy any pure and refreshing happiness. That is why I am more religious than you! -
Fare you well, dear kind Frau Kapellmeister! And once again a thousand thanks for your love! Give my best wishes to Franz, and tell him that all is well with me!
Yours,
Richard Wagner.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 209