Dear Wesendonck,
Although I find little time nowadays to review my past life with any degree of awareness, it is enough for me to mention your name in order to recall one of the most important periods of my life, and to recall it with such clarity that my heart, immediately suffused by the most tender feeling of gratitude for your kindness and friendship, is at once disposed to feel friendly towards you. Why your friendship and the sacrifices you made in providing for my welfare could bring neither peace nor quiet - that is a question I must now seek to answer: I understand the reason when I realize that no relationship in the world, no friendship, nor any love could ever bring me true peace and quiet. I understand the past, in which you, too, were so closely bound up, when I look back on that past from the standpoint of the present, with its strange tensions and excitements, a time into which is so powerfully woven the most visionary, devoted love of a wondrously talented royal youth for an older man who longs for rest. - I am not destined to enjoy peace and quiet: - no doubt there is good reason for that! -
Yet how happy I am if I can at least find peace in my recollection of the past: let me dream of repose in the memory of that time when I lived and worked under your own patronage! - It was a mightily creative period: in spite of the greatest exertions we have not yet reached the point of giving the world what was then created. The disruption which drove me from you six years ago ought to have been avoided: it so estranged me from my life that you yourself did not really recognize me, any more than I recognized myself, when I once again turned to you on that last occasion. I ought to have been spared this painful experience, too: I felt this should have been possible; it would have been fine, very fine, even sublime, if I could have been spared that experience. But - the sublime is not ours to command, - and I was wrong. -
A great deal has now changed in my life. Everything around me is now fairly new. Yet the new world only animates my attempt to reanimate the old world. The Nibelungs, too, are now to be taken up again, completed and presented to the world. What you could not achieve, for all your most generous and self-sacrificial sympathy, only a King can bring to fruition. I have confessed to you that, following my departure from your neighbourhood, my life was caught up in a current which consumed everything aimed at ensuring that my creative powers continued to flourish. Even the liberal advances which you made me against the publication of the Nibelung works were swallowed up on expenditure that no longer bore any useful relation to these works. As early as a year ago I had to ask you to regard those advances as lost, since there was no possibility of recovering them by publishing the works themselves. I must almost feel happy now at seeing even these works published: for the “Valkyrie”, of which I am sending you a copy today, I can obtain from my publisher no more than a very small part of the advance which he made me on the Mastersingers, a work whose completion now lies some time ahead. If I am now obliged, therefore, to ask you to renounce, in their entirety, your claims to my Nibelung works, I myself do not intend to abandon the hope of one day being able to pay back your advances in person. This of course can become possible only through the generosity of my royal friend. If, however, I am to think of his paying back even the debts that I owe to friends like yourself, I must necessarily wait for a suitable moment, and ask you in turn to wait. For the present you will understand how cautious I must be here lest I involve my youthful patron, who is scarcely of age yet, in too great a system of expenses on my account. Such is his ardour that what he envisages above all is a performance of the works themselves: we are establishing a school especially to train our performers, and a special theatre shall be built for the festival performances. You will have not failed to notice the disturbing effect that these plans have had on all sides, and what persecutions and threats the young King’s schemes have already caused me. I know that you will be the first to advise me to show prudence and self-restraint here, and - since it is within your power to do so - you, especially, will be only too pleased to help me, by dint of your patience and forbearance, to exercise the necessary prudence and self-restraint here. However, since these works can never yield the least profit from any commerce with the general public, they should and must now belong to the King of Bavaria. I shall never allow even Tristan and Isolde to be performed elsewhere, - and now probably not even in Munich. The Nibelungs can be presented to the nation only in the form of a festival gift bestowed by the King: as for the actual theatre where what is at stake is the need to please or the failure to please, to buy or not to buy, I am finished. I am sure, my dear friend, that you will understand me aright and not misconstrue my sympathetic request if I entreat you most sincerely to allow him who will complete and perform my Nibelung work to have sole possession of that part of it which is my work. Please understand me, and do not be displeased with me for asking you to be so kind and generous as to hand over to the King of Bavaria the original full score of the “Rhinegold”, which you are safeguarding. The King must, and will, hear of your rights in these works: I am certain that he will not leave you without compensation. If we postpone this reimbursement, it is because we trust in the kindness of an old friend who, by dint of this new demonstration of his nobility of mind, shall contribute to the prosperity of the creator of these works in such a way that he may obtain the peace and leisure he needs to support himself during their completion and performance. I am sure you will not be angry with me, and that you will understand my request?
No doubt it is unnecessary for me to add how much I need only emollient and favourable impressions at present, never, indeed, have I needed them more than now. The powers that govern my life, tormenting my soul and alarming me with the most unheard-of terrors, you will no doubt discover without my needing to tell you about them specially. If, amidst the glorious impressions of rehearsing Tristan, I dreamt for a brief space of a truly successful culmination to my long and painful life as an artist, I need only remind you that I returned a week ago from the body of my noble, glorious singer in order to tell you what I must think of my “success”!! -
Sincere good wishes to your dear wife! She will safeguard for ever what is more precious than the fair copy of the full score which I have requested back. If it grieves her, however, to return this to me, I may perhaps send you something in its place which I hope will seem a fair exchange. What? -
Fare you well, my good Wesendonck! May these lines find you well and of good cheer!
Yours,
Richard Wagner.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 329