[...] Yes! I hope to get better for your sake! To keep you for myself means the same to me as keeping myself alive for my art. To live with it - as a comfort for you - that is my task, and one that accords with my nature, my fate, my will, - and with my love. So am I yours; so shall you, too, get better through me! Here shall Tristan be completed - in spite of all the world’s rantings. And - if I may - I shall return with it to see you, to console you, and to make you happy! Thus it stands before me, as my most beautiful and most solemn wish. To work then! Tristan the hero, Isolde the heroine! help me! help my angel! Here shall you bleed to death, here shall your wounds be healed and closed. From here the world shall learn of the sublime and noble distress of supreme love, the lamentations of most sorrowful bliss. And, like some august god, sound in body and clear-eyed, you shall see me again, your humble friend! [...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 219