Accept my most grateful and heartfelt thanks, my child! —
I shall respond with a confession. It will be futile to speak it out loud: everything about you tells me that you know everything, and yet I still feel the urge to confirm what you already know. -
Only now am I fully resigned!
One thing I never abandoned, and, indeed, I believed I had regained it again with difficulty: it was the belief that I had found my Asyl once more, and that I could again live near you. - An hour together in Venice was sufficient to destroy this last fair delusion of mine!
I was soon forced to see that the freedom which you need and on which your very existence depends is something which you cannot maintain when I am near you: only my absence can give you the power freely to obey the dictates of your will; only when you have nothing to buy do you not have to admit to any price.
I cannot bear to see you constrained and oppressed, dominated and dependent as the price of my presence: I cannot make good this sacrifice, since my presence can offer you nothing in return, and the thought that I would mean so pitifully little to you in such circumstances makes me regard a presence that is bought at the price of freedom and true human dignity as a form of torment.
There is no point in flattering myself any longer. - I can see that you feel and know this yourself: indeed, you should be the first to do so! You realized it long ago, sooner than I, who for a long time afterwards continued to remain a secret and incurable optimist. -
It was this, and this alone, that in Venice lay on my soul like lead. It was not my situation nor my other misfortunes: I am, and always have been, indifferent to these ever since I first met you. You can scarcely believe with what total lack of feeling I decide all these matters which, in truth, do not affect my feelings at all, or, if they do, it is only in passing and then only in respect of a situation which might be worthy of me and in which there would be no question of success or failure for me.
I remain true to my assertion that it consoles me to know that the dispositions with which you are endowed and the bourgeois circumstances in which you find yourself make it possible for you to invest your suffering with an idyllic and gentle character. For my own part, I aspire only to ordering my outer life in such a way that I can abandon myself, unmolested, to my inner creative urge which has been preserved as good as new. What I need above all else is to settle down in a place of my own: I shall accept anything, no matter what the conditions. For I shall then be able to endure everything, but everything, since nothing can then oppress me. Life and all that relates to it no longer has any meaning for me. The questions “where?” and “how?” - are a matter of infinite indifference to me. I want to work: nothing more! Only then can I be anything to you, when I am entirely my own master. I know that is so, and you know it, too! The final appalling obstacle has been overcome: Venice, the return journey, and the subsequent three weeks - terrible! - they are now behind me! As long as I do not lose heart, things must work out! -
I shall often send you some of my work. You’ll be wide-eyed with amazement when you see my Mastersingers! Steel yourself against Sachs: you’ll fall in love with him! It is a wholly astonishing work! The old sketch had little or nothing to offer. Yes, one needs to have been in Paradise to know what lies hidden here! -
As for my life, you will hear only what is absolutely necessary - only its superficial aspects. Of my inner life - you may rest assured! - there is nothing at all to report; nothing but artistic creativity. Thus you will lose nothing but receive the only thing that has any value, my works. But we shall also see each other now and then. Do you not agree? But without any desire! And thus wholly free! -
Well! What a remarkable letter this is! You will not believe how relieved I am to know that you know that I know what you have known for so long! -
Here, in addition, is a Shoemaker’s Song! -
Adieu! my child!
The
Master!
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 272