My dear Franz,
You will presumably have reread my letter and discovered what I was jokingly referring to with my reproach that “your answer was far too emotional and serious”. It cannot have escaped your notice, given the precise terms of my - admittedly somewhat loosely worded - letter that what I understood by your reply was the way you had interpreted my attitude towards Dingelstedt in the matter of Rienzi. Since this section of my letter appears at all events to have remained unclear to you, I hope that the following will serve as an explanation. My letter to you on the subject of my withdrawing Rienzi was intended to be shown to others, since I had referred Dingelstedt to you. But I thought you would see through it and realize that what particularly annoyed me was his obstinacy concerning my fee, and the prospect of its being paid out so late. I hoped that, by raising the question of my withdrawing the entire opera, my letter would have the effect of producing the fee sooner rather than later, and perhaps even increase the amount that I received. I had - alas! - set my hopes on receiving this sum before the New Year, and thought I could count even more firmly on it inasmuch as I had already confided to you how difficult my position is at present. In sending you Dingelstedt’s recent letter, I had no other thought in mind than to complain about his pedantic instruction: “The fee will be paid out to you after the first performance” (an instruction which I am no longer accustomed to receiving from any other theatre), and to persuade you - as I made perfectly clear - at least to ensure that my fee was paid out to me without further delay. Since it was designed to be shown to others, my letter concerning the withdrawal of Rienzi may well have been unclear and difficult to interpret aright; but I know that I had intended it as a warning shot aimed at Dingelstedt and as a weapon for you - to obtain prompt and decent treatment for me. With this thought in mind, I hoped that the success of this little manoeuvre would be to secure the receipt of these wretched 25 l. d’or before the New Year, since I was obliged to regard this sum as the only revenue I could count on for the very good reason that you yourself could pursue the matter on the spot, whereas the other remittances that I could imagine receiving from all the various quarters were simply potential hopes which were just as likely to turn out to be vain. Thus I reached New Year’s Eve. My money was all gone; I had already pledged my watch, the Grand Duke’s snuff-box, and the Frau Kapellmeister’s bonbonnière (my only objects of value), and of the money obtained in this way I had only about one-and-a-half napoleons left. - When I returned that evening to my lonely New Year’s Eve apartment, I found your letter, and I admit my weakness in hoping that it would announce the imminent despatch of the 25 l. d’or, in consequence, moreover, of a successful demonstration against Dingelstedt which, I believed, I myself had set in train. Instead of which, I found, in respect of this matter, a serious explanation of your relations with Dingelstedt which, as I see from your letter, have already become a matter of bitter and worrying experience for you. I had foreseen this, and at the time - when Dingelstedt was called to Weimar at your instigation - I reproached you silently on the matter. I now understood, too, that, since you had already been feeling annoyed for some time, you were, on receipt of my last letter, in a mood that misled you as to the nature of my threat to withdraw Rienzi. All you saw in me was my annoyance - with which you sympathized - at all the unworthy things we have both had to face, and, in doing so, you failed to see that, poor devil that I am, I had not been entirely serious on this occasion. As a result you agreed, gravely and bitterly, to my withdrawal of Rienzi which, after the insults you had suffered, must finally have been most welcome to you, and I, in the situation I have described to you on New Year’s Eve, saw that my final, secret, but all the more certain, hope of being sent some money had now been dashed. At any other time, the great anguish of the moment would probably have reduced me to total silence and a feeling of reserve. But I had been waiting and longing for some sign of your sympathy for Tristan for such a long time and with such incredible suspense that when this boon finally arrived, it provoked a quite convulsive outburst of petulance on my part. Once again, your delight in my first act had suddenly brought you so close to my innermost soul that at such a moment I felt I could make the most insane demands on you. I said as much, if I am not mistaken, when I wrote that “your delight in Tristan is to blame for my fit of high spirits”. My dearest Franz, at such a moment I could not conceive of the possibility of a misunderstanding. Since I thought that everything, but everything, was so certain and infallible between us, I launched out in the opposite direction and reproached you for having left me in the lurch over the money, for having interpreted my political gesture or demonstration against Dingelstedt far too seriously and emotionally, in the context of whom I said I cared for nothing in the whole world but a little money: and I went on to say that everything which, at close hand and in your present position etc., appears to you to be grave and critical simply does not exist for me, since the only justification that these theatres have, with all their public art, is that of providing me with money. -
That of money - ! yes. - And will you reproach me for this? What? Do you not pity me because of it? Do you believe I would not prefer your attitude towards performances of my own works, whereby you do not have to worry about money? - My first letter to you this year will have taught you that I too am capable of regarding the matter more seriously and with genuine emotion, i.e. suffering.
Enough! Today’s letter from you, you will no doubt have realized, has left me feeling deeply shaken. I am, nevertheless, calm and confident. Your strange misunderstanding whereby you assumed that my reproach concerning your “grave and emotional reply” referred to your delight at Tristan must soon become perfectly obvious to you as such. I am in no doubt on that point, since any unprejudiced and intimate friend, were you to grant him a sight of our recent correspondence, would be able to persuade you, however prejudiced your own attitude, that my reproach (which, I may add, was intended to be merely humorous in its half-joking high-spiritedness) was directed at your interpretation of my intended withdrawal of Rienzi, and at the general point concerning my expectations of Dingelstedt, the Grand Duke and the whole shitting business of German opera houses in general. You now know the position which inspired this mood of desperate humour, and I hope it will be a long time before I again have to change my last napoleon at the telegraph office.
It is you, my friend, whom I see suffering and in need of comfort, for the extraordinary lines which you have now found it possible to send me must have sprung from a terrible inner resentment. I hope that you may draw some comfort from the detailed explanation that I have attempted here and from my disclosure of this misunderstanding of which you are guilty; I have no other comfort to offer you at present. If your ill-humour was directed at me alone, it ought to have been entirely dispelled by these lines. But I can further reassure you that you have in no way hurt me, since your arrows were wide of the mark, indeed, they remain embedded in your own heart with their barbs. May this help you to tear them out!
There is only one other favour that I have to ask of you today: -
Do not answer my letter of the 2nd of January, now or ever! Regard it as though it had never been written and never received. - I know now that you are not capable of putting yourself in my position with enough understanding and goodwill to do justice to that letter. I beg you - pay absolutely no heed to it! I will then forgive you the reproach you made me concerning my joint-stock artistic enterprises, you strange and dear, dear friend! -
And now, fare you well for today!
I am sure that I have not lost you!
Yours,
Richard Wagner.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 230