My glorious and dearly beloved King,
There is a secret which can be revealed to my august and gracious friend only in the hour of my death: but then it will become clear to him what today must seem obscure - that he alone is the creator and author of all that the world will attribute to my name from this day on. My sole reason for living is the wondrous love which descends upon me like drops of dew from the heart of my royal friend — as though from the lap of God — fructifying new seeds of life within me! Last All Souls’ Day I felt as though I were garlanding my own tomb with the gladsome flowers of this love. In truth, I — am no more! I have endured and suffered too much; life and its increasingly alien aspects have drawn me away for ever from my own inner self towards a state of dissipation which has finally grown too deep for me, and too disturbing. Now that I can finally compose my thoughts once more, - and only the magic power of your love and inspiration has made this possible, - I feel as though I am beginning a new and second life upon the grave of my old existence! And the sole creator of this life is my gracious friend, the saviour who leads me to a new religion, a religion which brings forth a second, new life from deep within me, - a life which knows not of death! -
It is to my royal friend that I dedicate the convalescent’s new-found strength in these feeble lines herewith. I may well hope that, as a result of the painful crisis which followed upon an earlier chronic illness, this selfsame illness will now be less afflicting than it has been previously, and that it may indeed be allayed for some time to come; so that I regard it as a good sign that, at the very moment of actually moving into my final refuge, I may look forward to the comforting prospect of an improvement in my health as well. Soon, indeed very shortly, I shall be back at my work again, like a man reborn, and I shall not forsake it again until it is completely finished. It is a marvellous passage where I now have to resume composition, having put the finishing touches to a number of earlier passages! It is the most sublime of all scenes for the most tragic of all my heroes, Wotan, who is the all-powerful will-to-exist and who is resolved upon his own self-sacrifice; greater now in renunciation than he ever was when he coveted power, he now feels all-mighty, as he calls out to the earth’s primeval wisdom, to Erda, the mother of nature, who had once taught him to fear for his end, telling her that dismay can no longer hold him in thrall since he now wills his own end with that selfsame will with which he had once desired to live. His end? He knows what Erda’s primeval wisdom does not know: that he lives on in Siegfried. Wotan lives on in Siegfried as the artist lives on in his work of art: the freer and the more autonomous the latter’s spontaneous existence and the less trace it bears of the creative artist - so that through it (the work of art), the artist himself is forgotten, - the more perfectly satisfied does the artist himself feel: and so, in a certain higher sense, his being forgotten, his disappearance, his death is - the life of the work of art. - This is the frame of mind in which I am now turning once again to the completion of my work: I want to be destroyed by my Siegfried - in order to live for ever! O beauteous death! -
With what awesome solemnity shall I now awaken Brünnhilde from her long sleep! She slept while Siegfried grew to young manhood. How significant this must all now seem to me! The last music I wrote was the woodbird’s announcement to Siegfried that he would be able to waken Brünnhilde if he had not learnt the meaning of fear: laughing, he ran after the bird which, fluttering away, showed him the way to the magic rock. - This road, my gracious, royal friend! - this road was long and arduous for me. I believed I should never, never reach the rock. But, if I am Wotan, I have now succeeded through Siegfried: it is he who awakens the maid, the most precious thing in the world. My work of art will live, - it lives! -
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 314