[...] The trend, so favourable to me, of your comprehensive discourse on my Tannhäuser, best pleases me as evidence of the impression my work made upon yourself. I must truthfully confess, if you would like to know my real feelings upon reading your paper, that it was a most anxious experience. Whether I read praise or blame of myself I always feel as if someone were seizing and examining my entrails. Neither have I outgrown a certain maidenly bashfulness as though my soul were my body. A public performance of one of my operas is still an occasion of such boundless emotional turmoil that I have frequently tried to prevent performances when I have felt unequal to this interior conflict.
I am fully convinced that blame is far more useful to the artist's self than praise. The man who is ruined by criticism deserves his fall—only he who accepts it as a challenge has true inward power. But it is, nevertheless, clear that the true artist in whom Nature herself has implanted passion at its strongest for a spur, is bound to feel either praise or blame very acutely.
As I create with ever-heightened artistic consciousness I am more and more impelled to make a whole man. I want to create flesh and blood and limbs, a being who freely and truly lives and moves, and I am often amazed when I see how many perceive only the flesh and examine its softness or hardness. Let me speak more plainly. To touch on one sphere only, nothing has satisfied me better than the effect upon the public at most performances of Tannhäuser [...] of the whole scene of the Song Contest. I have known each of the songs in it to be received with the liveliest interest, rising to unwonted heights of excitement during the last songs and at the outburst of horror in the assembly which closes the scene. I tell you this observation has immensely pleased me, because as an instance of extreme naivete in the public it proves to me that the noblest ends are attainable. Very few could be sure whether they had the musician or the poet to thank for this impression and I need only leave it an open question.
I naturally have no special ambition to see my poetry cast into the shade by my music, but I would certainly be guilty of a lie were I to pretend that my music was at the mercy of my poetry. I cannot make use of any poetic matter which is not first conditioned by music. My Song Contest, even though the poetic element predominates in it, could not have expressed my higher intentions without music.
But a work of art does not exist till it becomes apparent; in drama this means performance upon the stage. As far as lies in my power I mean to master this aspect and I value my capacity to do so effectively almost equally with the other faculties of my creative gift. [...]
[...] I would not care to venture a decision as yet as to whether music is, of its essence, able exactly to render the meaning of a poem, however musical the latter may be. Gluck's poems certainly make no very extreme demands upon the passionate possibilities of the music, being more or less confined to a certain limited pathos—that of the tragedies of Racine—and wherever this ought to have been overstepped, Gluck's music fails unmistakably to rise to the occasion. The poems of Mozart's operas are still less concerned with the deepest realities of human nature. Donna Anna is a single exception, but the possibilities are far from exhausted even there. Spontini in the second act of The Vestal (the Julia scene) and Weber in portions of Euryanthe (for instance the moment after the betrayal of her secret to Eglantine, etc.) have nothing better with which to meet the occasion than "diminished seventh music," and I, for my part, can only recognise here a limitation in our forefathers' musical achievements.
It is indisputable that we are far from having attained the highest and truest in opera as measured by these models—I speak of the dramatic work of art as a whole, not of the purely musical aspect—and in this conviction and relying on powers which I am more inclined to despair of than to over-estimate in myself, I regard my present and forthcoming works simply as experiments to ascertain the possibilities of opera. [...]
A world of difference separates us, as shown by your estimate of Meyerbeer. I can say this without the least embarrassment, for I am personally friendly with him and have every reason to value him as a sympathetic and amiable person. But when I want to sum up everything which repels me in the trade of opera composition as being intellectually muddled and technically feeble, I comprehend it under the word "Meyerbeer," and all the more so since I recognise an extraordinary knack of getting a superficial effect in Meyerbeer's music, a thing which hinders the true development of art by offering gratification divorced from spirituality. He who strays into the realm of the trivial has to pay for it by the loss of his higher nature, but he who deliberately seeks the trivial is—fortunate, for he has nothing wherewith to pay. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 126