[...] — When it recently struck me how indispensably necessary it is to risk everything on a first performance of Tristan, I said to myself: with this goal in mind, you will be spared all further humiliation! Each and every step that you take in pursuance of the necessary power and means cannot involve you in any shame, and to anyone who does not understand you when he sees you travelling these untrodden pathways, you may call out: “What do you know of my goal?” - For only he who understands this can understand me. -
Every day gives birth to new plans; I see now one possibility and now another before my mind’s eye. So inextricably am I bound up with this work that - in all seriousness - I could willingly lay down my life and swear that I should not wish to live a day longer once I had had the work performed. And so it is only natural that the thought which now preoccupies me is to forgo all the struggles and humiliations which I should have to face in order that “Parisian” successes might furnish me with the means I need, and, instead, incur the utter torment of going to Dresden, submitting to a formal examination and judgement, and - for all I care - receiving a pardon, so that I could then be left alone to look round, on the spot, for the very best theatre in Germany where I could perform Tristan, and in that way exorcise the spell that now has hold of me. There is nothing else that seems to me to be worth my effort! It almost strikes me as being the most sensible thing to do, and I cannot but regard it as an act of unpardonable egotism to reject all idea of torment and shame, if this might lead to the redemption of my work. For what am I - without my work? - And then there is something else! I do not believe in my opera in French. Everything I do in furtherance of this aim contradicts the inner voice that I can silence only by levity or by force. I believe in neither a French Tannhäuser, nor a French Lohengrin, to say nothing of a French Tristan. In any case, all my steps in this direction remain doomed: a daemon, - no doubt my daemon - is against me in everything. Only a despot’s command could sweep aside all the personal obstacles that prevent me from making headway in the Paris Opera. But I have no real desire to obtain that command. Above all, what interest do I still have in my old works, works to which I have grown almost indifferent in the meantime? I regularly catch myself out feeling only the most total disinterest in them. And now the French translations! I must regard them as utterly impossible. The few lines that were translated for my concert cost me unspeakable effort, and were insufferable. Nor - in spite of endless labours - has a single act of any of my operas been translated yet, and the little that I have in front of me here disgusts me. It is because of the language that everything here remains so alien to me. The torment of a conversation in French is uncommonly wearying for me, and I often break off in the middle of a discussion, like a man racked by utter despair, who tells himself: “it really isn’t possible after all, everything is futile!” I then feel quite wretched and homeless. And I ask myself: where do you belong? There is no country, no town, no village that I can call my own. Everything is alien to me, and I often gaze around me, yearning for a glimpse of the land of nirvana. But nirvana quickly turns back into Tristan; you know the Buddhist theory of the origin of the world. A breath clouds the clear expanse of heaven: [music example] it swells and grows denser, and finally the whole world stands before me again in all its impenetrable solidity. That is my age-old destiny, as long as I continue to have such unexorcized ghosts around me! -
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 256