Best thanks, dear Friend, for your most interesting letter! Certainly no one has more beautifully conceived and outlined the high and only pregnant possibility of a political development of European mankind. Your idea of Rome has much impressed me, and I sought at once for what I myself could do to help it forward.
Dear friend, thus much is certain: the Messias-myth is that of the profoundest bearing on all earthly effort. The Jews were waiting for the liberator, the Messias, who should establish the kingdom of David, bring justice with him, before all else, but also grandeur, power, security against oppression. Well, everything concurred: born in Bethlehem, of the seed of David, the prophecy of the three Kings, etc., festal welcome to Jerusalem, palms strewn — there He stands, all listen — and He proclaims to them: "My kingdom is not of this world! Renounce your wishes; there lies the only freedom and redemption!" Believe me, all our political liberation-mongers appear to me, in private, like those Jews. But! we can tell that to the veriest few, of course, and accordingly — look on! The special stimulus of Italy, however, I don't deny.
Your projects of a Florentine settlement are most respectable. What may not happen to me yet! I can decide on nothing even a month in advance. Most certainly I wish and seek for nothing more upon this earth than leisure for work, as that alone can make my presence on it either explicable or acceptable to me. Performances I can entirely forego. I'm silently plodding at a plan to die to all men, and somewhere quietly, as a departed spirit, work out my artistic drafts and nothing else. Otherwise I shall never come to rest.
Naturally I propose to stay here as long as I can anyhow manage, for my work. It is progressing, and satisfactorily — but I can't work fast: firstly, because of unavoidable outer and inner interruptions; secondly, because no single bar can give me pleasure, that does not owe its origin to a really good idea. Those, however, one cannot command.
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to Wesendonck et al., trans. and indexed by William Ashton Ellis (Grant Richards, 1899), No. 51