My dear Friend,
It troubles me, that I have disquieted you about myself. What am I to do? Can I be frank, without complaining? Or am I, where alone I gladly give myself without reserve, to practise a friendly deception? And if I did, should I be believed? Were I believed, however, what bitterness for me to know myself then quite alone! Silence? How long could that benefit, without alarming? I think, and walk each day with you. Then I say to myself: 't were best for me to take the pains to choke the reason of my cry, to make myself insensible, to fight off worry. But how begin it? — That I am alive, is the ground of every cry; that I am thus; that my whole being and doing place me so entirely out of all relation with the actual world, and yet I have to keep on living in this world, in it to satisfy my needs, — this generates the constant reaction under which I continually, daily, hourly must suffer, and nothing can lift me out of it. With all my thoughts and schemes I stand, and remain, too far outside all present possibility! Lest I should abandon everything and quite despair, just rarely now and then a tiny smile is cast on me by my surrounding, which surprises me the more and produces the greater effect on me, as it comes so unexpectedly and from amid the coldest strangeness. I remain receptive to it, and hardly know whether to take it for a blessing or a misfortune: a blessing because it holds despair aloof, a misfortune because it always casts me back again into the old circuit. My adventure with the douanier was of this sort, as once the Strassburg episode with the Tannhäuser-overture. But I have grown accustomed to fix my eye no longer piercingly and lastingly upon this smile: nothing earnest, nothing decisive to be awaited from it; it remains but just a smile, and only meant to cheer me for a moment.
For that matter, for the pursuit and execution of the plan of a performance of the Tannhäuser in Paris, e.g., it would need so good and permanently good an humour (just so as not to take things too heavily) that — as I don't know how to get and keep that humour — I can hardly seriously believe in the success on which everything now seems to depend, and to depend because I otherwise see absolutely nothing else before me than fresh confusion, fresh upset of my situation. This always mingles so despotically and determinantly in all my relations to art, that I really shall never enjoy life, either, for a month at a stretch! — God knows, this Paris was not my choice! I seized it with none but the certainty of a man who has no choice. After the completion of Tristan — when, as you will remember, I wanted to leave Lucerne at once — my purpose (which — like all such phases of life — I had viewed in nothing but a hazy, floating distance) suddenly rose in sharpest line before my eye, and I recognised myself as so ill-equipped for it that — as I wrote you — I let my hands fall powerless to my side, and could think of nothing but to cease from every effort and wait in utter apathy for what was to become of me. From this unbearable condition I turned at last to you; you put your oar in splendidly: so the thing was to go.
And yet, my friend, it does not go. The reckoning was made without the host; and the comfortable sense of security, with which I sketched the plans for my support, is over. This migration, the removal and new furnishing, tear all my calculations down, and the day when I rented this little house, and prepaid the last two terms as demanded for security — has become the outset of interminable cares for me! You would not wonder at it, and certainly must only recognise my abstinence, were I to detail to you the endless malheur into which I have fallen. Let that be for another time! For to-day merely this: that of late I have had with true grief to see my plan for compassing my livelihood by our Nibelungen transaction, until the time when a fresh and lasting fund should have arisen from other takings to be set aside meanwhile, totally shattered; at least it has become quite impossible with [the proceeds of] Rheingold and Walküre. Listen with self-command, and don't be angry if I tell you that, in increasing anxiety about my immediate future, I have had to look around for sources of assistance that might flow from my other works. I was already drawing Tristan into this calculation, when Tristan is suddenly struck totally out for a length of time: its first performance altogether impossible for the present!
Now, here the truly torturing conflict between my art and my worldly interest comes again into clear sight. Believe me that I had already become so small-minded (when I perceived the growing difficulties of my Paris establishment) as to wish to hold by Carlsruhe even with the voiceless female singer! I know what pain so mangled a performance would have given me, and yet I could almost regret being freed from that pain. How do you imagine that I feel in such a dilemma? — So the Tristan doesn't exist for me now: or — ? but no! that is not to be even thought of! At Berlin my Lohengrin has lost his voice, and I look forward to a long pause in the performance of that opera there. So I must turn my eyes all the more eagerly to the Paris Tannhäuser. Well, that will probably come off, and if I have the humour for it, this outlook (which by all means has its signal value for my situation) is assured me. But it isn't to be thought of so all at once. The Director is ready, and wants to be able to give the opera. But how long they will leave his theatre standing (as it is to be pulled down on account of a new thoroughfare), he doesn't know for certain: possibly it will be demolished this coming March. On the other hand they will build him a grand new theatre; I believe Carvalho wants to put Tannhäuser off till then. For a man who can wait, the affair doesn't look so bad: but to be in my position with it all, is ignominious.
However, I am getting on with the translation. Roger will do the thing very well; without standing at the height of culture and endowment to do justice to the poetic aspect of the task, in everything else he is quite well fitted for the translation. Only last Sunday did our rendez-vous take place in his Château de la Lande. In the first glow he had already translated the opening scene: with my constant preparedness for evil, I was agreeably surprised this time; he sang the scene himself right well, and the French text was quite singable, the accent correct, the phrase not markedly distorted. So I plucked up hope. He invited me to come out often to his country-seat, to work together there without disturbance. Yesterday accordingly I went again: I then perceived that I have to do with an amiable and gifted nature, which cannot, however, bear mental exertion for long, and willingly turns back to trivial habit. He had worked very little, and begged me to come oftener, to spur him on; all the same he seized the first pretence to steal away from the pianoforte to the domino-table, where he stuck in bliss till I made my bow — in view of the hopeless company — and started back to Paris. Next Monday I am to go again. A terrible ill-humour, a wounded pride, often boils up in me: I seem to myself a wretch, degraded and unworthy of my being. God knows if I am understood! What should I do, make, or effect? Yet — I see well enough that I must try to find myself in Roger too: and he really is quite a charming fellow. His pretty talent has also blessed him: his property and goods are valued at a million [francs], and he has a castle too, in a great big park with lofty, glorious trees, to play dominos in. Then I come back home, and question if I shall be blamed for ordering chênes [logs] for all the hearths in my house. So wags the world — and if I'm in good humour, the Tannhäuser shall wag too. But — humour is needed for it! That you see.
I regard this Paris project, when taken seriously, as nothing but another of the tricks to keep on dangling something before me, to entice me to hold out. I know them! Just so am I now shewn a brand-new allurement for the Tristan: the Dresden Intendant sends me word that he hopes to obtain the King of Saxony's command for me to come to Dresden for a first representation of Tristan. But that could not take place before July next year. At least I should have singers with good voices there. Now what is one to say to it?
O children! What a mass of wretched stuff I've been writing you again! Perhaps silence would have been better. Yet this is the only language in which I can convey to human understanding what certainly is often not understood when I simply express my yearning for the end. All that I suffer, I bear through nothing but the power of the wish to have peace and security round me once more in this world of robbers, to be able — forgetting all my misery — to set to work again! Believe me, I no longer have a wish save this. Of late I have again come to the lively conviction that I can renounce even the performance of Tristan, and everything, only to know that I may work on undisturbed! Now I am bracing myself, to get air again for my last act of Siegfried: breathe I but that once more, then everything is alike to me. For this I see: I am entirely what I am, only when I am creating. The actual performance of my works belongs to a more settled time, to a time which I must first prepare for by my sufferings!
My most congenial art-friends have nothing beyond astonishment for my new works; every one, who stands at all near to our public art-life, feels too feeble for hope. There I meet nothing save pity and sadness! And they really are right! Nothing teaches me better, how terribly I have overleapt all around me, than a good sharp look-down from myself on those who stand between me and just that world. —
So let me work myself completely out: oh, had I nothing, nothing else to do upon this earth! Rest! Rest! that the inner torch may burn soft and bright, which flickers so wildly under the breath of this life of want, and soon must be extinct. Let me but create the works I there was given, in peaceful glorious Switzerland, there with my gaze upon the lofty gold-wreathed mountains: they're wonder-works, and nowhere else could I have received them. Let me finish them: then am I done with and redeemed! But ask nothing, nothing else from me, and don't rejoice when "successes" beckon me: their price is fearful.
A thousand greetings! My heart is lightened: may your own not have become too heavy!
Your
Richard Wagner.
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to Wesendonck et al., trans. and indexed by William Ashton Ellis (Grant Richards, 1899), No. 22