Tell me, dear friend, how was it possible for you to pass me by this summer? How often have I wanted to address this question to you! My astonishment has until now prevented me from doing so. — So it was possible for you to ignore even your husband’s exhortation? You have lived, in the closest intimacy, through strange and terrible periods of my life, both in me and with me, feeling and suffering with me, only to abandon me completely and without warning at an important high point of my life! - How odd! It certainly gives me further food for thought! -
What shall I now tell you about myself? -
I spoke of an “important high point”: I did not say a “joyful” one. The fact that even here, at this high point of my life, there was really only pain and suffering for me to feel, - that is something you perhaps suspected, and felt in too much pain yourself to offer me your sympathy? -
There was a brief period when I really thought I was dreaming, so marvellously well did I feel. This was the period when I was rehearsing “Tristan”.
For the first time in my life, I and the whole of my entire art lay as though upon a bed of love. It had to be so, just for once. All the workshop arrangements were noble, ample, free and generous: a wonderful pair of artists, sent to me by heaven itself, intimately familiar with their task, utterly devoted, and quite astonishingly talented. My faithful guardian angel, hovering over me as beautiful and beneficent as ever, filled with childlike exultation at my contentment and delight in our increasing success: ordering whatever might serve my purpose, removing whatever was in my way, and always with an unseen hand. The work grew like some enchanted dream to become an unsuspected reality: the first performance - without an audience, just for us - advertised as a dress rehearsal, it was like the fulfilment of an impossible vision.
The feeling that I was dreaming never left me: I was amazed - utterly amazed - that it could have all come about! - It was a wonderful high point, and yet made bitter by - absences. - Really: bitter! How petty you all seemed to me for avoiding this - excitement! -
From then on - nothing but sheer suffering. Since I really pay very little heed to so-called “success”, all subsequent experiments before the general public (for that is how I accounted them) were simply disturbing and humiliating for me. At the fourth performance - during the final act - I was seized by a sense of the sinful nature of this unprecedented achievement: I cried out: this is the last performance of Tristan, it must never be given again. This has now been fulfilled. My glorious singer left us rejoicing, happy and blissful in his pride and sense of well-being. Eight days later I rushed to Dresden to be present at his burial: flying gout was the name of the daemonic illness which passed from his knee-joint to his brain. There he lay. - Since then I have been in a sorry state. I was lonely in the mountains, and now I am lonely here. I can no longer speak to anyone, and am still believed to be out of town. The King’s wonderful love keeps me alive: he cares for me as no man has ever cared for another. I live in him, and intend to go on creating my works for him. I really no longer live for myself. But he keeps at bay everything that reminds me of life and reality: I can continue only to dream and work.
That is how things stand and how they will go on. My pleasure in my work consumes all my memories. The Nibelungs are now being completed: a Parzival has already been sketched. It is all wonderful, dreamlike: otherwise it would all be deadly painful.
Now you must tell me about yourself. -
I expect to hear from you some time that our friend Mathilde has finally demanded back from you the letter that I wrote to her. You will no doubt understand that I can never write to her again until she has answered this letter. -
A thousand good wishes, dear sweet friend! Do you still recall your prophecies? But it is not a question of that here: what could be fulfilled has been fulfilled as nothing else has ever been fulfilled - more beautiful than any dream. And you did not even wish to come near the place where this dream came true?
How are things with the bundle in the famous portfolio? -
My warmest and very best wishes to you all from your
Richard Wagner.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 335