My dear Lady,
Please don't be cross with me! You see, at last I come unbidden, to shew you, by my writing of my own accord once more, that I also had never forgotten you. Have thanks for your fidelity.
In effect, dear friend, I was so beset that I really had some scruples about giving my friends useless pain by news from me. During the whole of this latter time I had but a single period when I actually existed. This was when I shut myself up in Paris, in the most execrable circumstances, as if for my last chance of life, and wrote my Meistersinger poem in four weeks. At the end of January I had finished it, and my next concern was to find a refuge in which to compose its music. That I have at last arranged, with untold difficulties, here at Biebrich; which took up all my time until to-day, in constant war with disagreeables and the worst of humour. To-morrow, however, I hope to begin the composition. My object is to have the whole thing ready by late-autumn, so that it may go the round of all the German theatres next winter, with which I don't intend to fash myself at all. This resolution was my only safety. For such an undertaking I could claim the requisite advances from my publisher to keep me for a year of work. The month of work in Paris was my happiest, but I could keep up the spell only when I let my eyes roam neither left nor right; at last I saw no more human beings, nothing but Garçons and Concierges. The poem has given me prodigious joy; I believe it is my choicest product. I will have it printed toward the end of summer; till when, alas! I cannot give it you to read. Yet, here is a sample. Sachs cobbles by night at his stall, and sings the while.
[Hans Sachs's song from Act II.]
Well! What more do you want? You have verses now! For what concerns my other life, I keep men off as far as possible; you will guess that from the choice of my retreat. Above all, I take good care to have no intercourse henceforth with theatre and opera-house; I can get light to create for this people, only when I don't see it.
What you write me about Bakunin has interested me much; I could see the whole man before me. He is, and remains, a colossal chap. One must really take the bear as book, to account for such a nature. Röckel, too, has been let out of prison at last: he has behaved splendidly, and shewn an unshakable firmness; he boasts a bear's nature too, and is delighted at the chance of agitating and politicising again to his heart's content. In truth I have nothing against it, and am glad to see such people at their handicraft. But really it becomes too much a métier, and for that they hit on a routine of thought and view which I often have to envy them, though I can find no actual substance in it. However, that doesn't seem at all required. The formalism of Politics has such a many-headed name, that it will always look like something. There's no help for it: I no longer see the masses, but only individuals; and there each person ever thinks his way, and I think mine! — Adieu, dear friend! From his whole heart greets you
Your
R. W.
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to Wesendonck et al., trans. and indexed by William Ashton Ellis (Grant Richards, 1899), No. 50