[...] Our friend returned to Munich with her children two days ago in order to put her affairs in order, and to carry out, with due dignity, her irrevocable decisions. She has gone with my blessing: I have every reason to honour her as the purest witness to sincerity and inexhaustible profundity that life has had to offer me: she is the most perfect creature ever to enter the realm of my own experience. That is why she belongs to a different world-order. There is nothing I can do except to stand by her: I pray that you, too, my exalted and gracious lord, will loyally support me in this! -
My unique and noble lord will sense from these intimations that I am caught up in a mood of vital import, when final decisions have to be made. It will not be easy to explain exactly what this mood is, nor how it came about. There is much here that I must leave to the future to unravel, perhaps even to posterity: I have done enough to place in the hands of my solicitous friend all that he needs to judge me accurately. My most gracious beloved, if you have kept all my letters and memoirs, then you will have in your possession all the unique and necessary material for such time in the future when, in advancing and less troubled years, you wish to evoke the spiritual form of him who is your friend. Nowhere have the changes that have taken place in my life, whether outwardly or inwardly, during the four-and-a-half years since I found you, been accorded more complete and clearly intelligible expression than in my communications to you, to which you have at all times given such gracious encouragement. It would therefore be more than superfluous if I were to return here to any of the points contained in those communications: what was built, what was destroyed will all become clear to you one day when you reflect upon your friend with this legacy before you. Only in a few details do these communications require completion: may what follows be a brief attempt at such an undertaking. -
In taking up where I left off before, I can do no more than renew my thanks and declare that the evening of the first performance of the “Mastersingers” was the high point of my career as man and artist. Just as it will be found, in time, that this work of mine is the most perfect of all that I have written so far, so must I declare that this performance of it - which I owe to your goodness alone - was the best that has ever been given of any of my works: the inestimable honour which you showed me that evening at your side I declare to be the most deeply-felt reward ever bestowed upon a leading artist. And so I declare that there is nothing more I could ask for here: that no desire for anything greater could remain in my heart. - And now you discover that on that selfsame evening I also felt how utterly and completely wretched my life has become, and that I suffered from my inner wounds to the point of utter exhaustion. To be able to explain this to you I would have to have died first! - Last winter, while dining with friends, I drank a toast in which I said that only he would know great success who renounced all joy of it in advance. I was understood by everyone! Well then: such a success was reserved for me; I have just described it, and declared that it could not have been more perfect. How is it then that it was also the very pinnacle of joylessness for me? My most gracious friend, this, too, will become clear to you some day. Here are but a few indications.
The work itself, which I have just described to you as my most perfect, will live on: but how? I expect that all the German theatres will attempt to appropriate it; but not one of them has shown the inclination or intention to give it complete and unmutilated. The utter wretchedness and deep decline into which the German theatre has sunk is something I shall discover to an even fuller extent by what happens to this very work of mine. I resisted every concession, and was determined not to grant permission for any performances of the work to be given: it was impossible to carry this out! Trusting solely in the great popularity of the piece, my publisher made great sacrifices at the time in order to be able to publish it, sacrifices the like of which had not been heard of previously: I am duty-bound to make amends for this by doing nothing to oppose performances of the work. The only thing to which I could have appealed in these circumstances - a sense of honour on the part of German theatre administrators and their staff - but the last spark of all such feeling has been snuffed out in this land of ours! Appalling desolation surrounds me on all sides; no one understands me; many are amazed; the majority deride me. In Munich I had a theatrical success: that is all that will live after me of my work! — It pains me to think of it. -
I declared the performance to have been supremely successful: - but who has the faintest idea of the daily torments and the hopelessness I felt as I conducted these rehearsals? This is something, my King, which I cannot even begin to hint at without describing the most deep-seated discord of a kind you could scarce comprehend. How very deceptive are appearances here, concealing things from our sight with all the greater obscurity in that the noblest hopes and desires inspire us to maintain delusions and errors without which, it seems, the world cannot exist. Who can bear the truth? - Enough: even in the face of a performance which finally turned out such an exemplary success, I knew I was utterly alone, unbefriended, and not understood; all I could do was to smile at the deceptive effects of an illusion which I myself had conjured up with convulsive efforts and which shone forth on every side, but which left my soul untouched. - Never again shall I attend a performance of one of my works!
After all this I must surely have reason to fear and lament that even you will find me inscrutable and enigmatic? Might even you be inclined to believe that I was not pleased to receive the most extravagant proof of your favour with which you raised me to an honour which I have already declared to have struck me as unique and unparalleled? Might you think that I did not retain it as a joyful memory? - Oh my King! As little as I could fail to love my work or could misprize it because of all my sufferings, so little could I doubt in the value of your love and favour. But the very greatness of this love and favour was bound to fill me with sadness, nay, with horror, since this was the only air that I breathed. Time and again I saw you appearing before me, shedding upon me the light of your splendour, so that the eyes of the whole world were bound to be drawn in my direction: I saw then the looks of those from whom you had set me so immeasurably far apart, and in them I read only the sufferings that I knew must strike me down. And this time, too, the arrows of vengeance have struck home, and - as before - it is not only I that is wounded. It is the mark of a King not to heed, not to understand what is aimed at those whom he feels called upon and qualified to protect: and so I feel that I should not complain here, nor make any accusations. It is fate that speaks here: a semblance of happiness spares us until the semblance itself must fade. “Against baseness the gods themselves contend in vain.” The contest is over. Every hope is dead, and the cry of “Too late!” rings forth with tongue of brass! - May one thing alone remain: your love! -
Thus, my King, may I show you by means of a single example what other life exists apart from the one which the world alone sees and knows. - And now, my exalted and most dearly beloved! You ask after Siegfried? - What would you say if I were to answer this question with a tale of ill health? -
When I arrived in Munich on my birthday, my doctor hoped that I would be able to travel to Kissingen under his supervision and complete the course of treatment there that I have been in need of for so long now. He soon realized that this was out of the question, such were the agitations caused by the rehearsals for the Mastersingers! The treatment was postponed until July, by which time I would have retired to the tranquillity of Triebschen. I arrived here at the end of June, and during the first week succumbed to a serious illness with a persistent, debilitating fever. The result was that it is now too late to begin my course of treatment this year: in order for it not to have exhausted me, it would have had to have lasted six weeks; it would then have been followed by a period of convalescence in the mountains, for which there was, however, no longer a suitable time. I also consulted my own physician, Dr Standhartner in Vienna: the conclusion was postponement of the treatment until next year. -
I must now entreat my most gracious friend to be allowed, at all costs, to devote next spring and next summer to recovering my health, and not to insist upon anything that would again make it impossible for me to undertake the treatment I so badly need. And so: no performance of any new, as yet unperformed, work of mine next year! For even if all my demands were met and if everything were done, according to your royal decree, to enable a performance of part of my Nibelung work to take place, I could not be present in person to co-operate with you on this performance, and, without this, believe me, such a performance would be wholly abortive.
And it is the favour of this self-denial on your part that I must now begin by begging of you! -
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 370