Dearest Fellow,
Your little letter reached me yesterday, just as I had come down from the Bernese highlands.
A piece of business information appears important to me, and little as it suits my present surroundings and frame of mind, yet I will give it to you at once!
The lithographing of the decorations we will leave alone for the present, and, instead, each theatre must purchase the sketches for nine thalers. I have written in this sense to Schmidt at Frankfort: he must apply to you, and you must be good enough to order the designs through Hähnel (to whom my cordial greetings). The designer could, in order to avoid delay, always hold in readiness one or two copies.
About a second score to Schmidt I know nothing: this is probably one procured formerly through the bookshop.
I have continued to dilly-dally about the few sheets for Tannhäuser: do not be angry about it; when I return I will send them on.
I have now been travelling for six days: I can count each day by my treasury, for each one costs me regularly a twenty-franc piece. It is splendid here, and in thought I have travelled much with you. Yesterday I descended from the Faulhorn (8,261 feet). There I had a tremendously grand view of the mountain-, ice-, snow-, and glacier-world of the Bernese Oberland, which lies straight before one, as though one could take it in one's hands. I walk well, and am sound in my legs; as yet, however, I am not satisfied with my head; the nerves of the brain are terribly strained; excitement and lassitude — never true rest! Shall I really never be much better? No cure in the world is of any avail where only one thing would help — viz., if I were different from what I am. The real cause of my sorrow lies in my exceptional position towards the world and towards my surroundings, which can no longer give me any joy; everything for me is martyrdom and pain and insufficiency! How again, on this journey amidst wonderful nature, have the human canaille annoyed me: continually must I draw back from them in disgust, and yet I so long after human beings; but this pack of rogues! Devil take them!!
There are magnificent women here in the Oberland, but only so to the eye; they are all tainted with rabid vulgarity.
Liszt has duly sent me one hundred thalers for the Dutchman honorarium; these I am now spending in travelling. Every day costs me a number of the opera.
Farewell, and get your stomach in proper order; I cannot, as a rule, digest milk; it gives me heart-burn.
I shall expect a letter from you at Locarno.
Your
R. W.
Do read in Prutz's Deutsches Museum an article, "Der Geist in der Musik," by Otto Gumprecht (I think it is in the first June number); among other things you will find in it a heavenly explanation of the A major Symphony, in which everything is frenzy, despair, and God knows what else! There's choice reading for you! It is inconceivable what a fine thing absolute music is!
X. was again glorious with his report. What a deal of trouble the man takes to prove that he was always an exceedingly clever fellow!
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to His Dresden Friends, Theodor Uhlig, Wilhelm Fischer, and Ferdinand Heine, trans. J. S. Shedlock (Scribner & Welford, 1890), No. 69