My most dearly beloved royal lord and merciful friend,
Ever consoled when I raise my eyes to my unique prince, I shall endeavour to collect together my far-scattered thoughts to send you a brief report on my recent adventures. I was in Berlin! My gracious friend knows the reasons for my — merely superficial — involvement in that expedition, which, to a certain extent, could be seen as the starting-point for Angelo Neumann’s audacious venture. As a result I attended the dress rehearsals and the first performance of the whole cycle of the Nibelung’s Ring: I had set off for Berlin with a very real sense of dread, but was able to return fairly reassured, and even with a certain - relative - satisfaction. The final words which I felt moved to address to the audience there were the truth: I was astonished to witness this success, just as I was astonished at my work. The most extraordinary part about it was that a work which has made such great claims on my life now appeared so completely new to me: I had let it unfold in front of me, in total objectivity, allowing everything to pass before me, pure and clear, as though reflected in the mirror of my soul, and my reaction was one of great satisfaction, mixed with some surprise that such a work could have been written today and - finally - that it could have been presented to the theatre audience of a large city without provoking their actual displeasure and rejection. It is without doubt the Aryan race’s most characteristic work of art: no nation on earth could be so clearly conscious of its origins and predisposition than this one tribe from Upper Asia, a tribe which was the last to enter European culture and which until that time had retained its purity better than all the other white races. One could well feel hope on witnessing the success of such a work in our midst!
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 485