My Dear Friend!
It is to you I turn when I feel I must unburden my heart, and to-day I need heartening, that I do not deny! [...]
Your friendship—if you could only understand how much it means to me! I have no other wish than to live near you with my wife for always. It is not Paris nor London, it is you who can best bring out whatever may still be in me, for I can take fire to do my best from you.
[...] Switzerland did me good and I met an old friend of my youth there with whom I was able to speak much of you. It was Alexander Müller, whom you know too, an excellent, likeable fellow and an artist. In Zurich I got hold of and read your article on Tannhäuser in the Journal des Débats. What have you been about? You set out to describe my opera and have instead produced a real work of art of your own! You have written about the opera just as you conducted it—in a perfectly new and individual way of your own! As I laid the article down my first thoughts were, "This marvellous man can touch and do nothing without pouring out upon it the interior riches of himself. He can never merely reproduce; no activity is possible to him save the purely creative. [...]" Shortly after the publication of your article I arrived in Paris. We know well enough that my being here is due to accident. [...] This accident, however, has from the first coloured my standing in Paris very markedly and—that colour strikes our friend Meyerbeer as of the blackest! Oh my dear Liszt, you must come to see this man clearly as he is! But what am I saying? Have you not long realised that natures such as Meyerbeer's are directly opposed to such as yours and mine? Have you not long known that the connection between you and Meyerbeer could only hold through generosity on your part and cunning on his [...]? Meyerbeer is small-minded, through and through, and I am sorry to say I meet no one now who has the least inclination to doubt it.
[...] I will work as I can, but I cannot possibly sell my wares in this market. The whole trade in art here is so vile, so putrescent and moribund that it simply awaits a courageous reaper able to wield the scythe. Dearest friend, apart from all political speculation, I yet feel constrained to affirm without reservation that no art can grow in anti-revolutionary soil. Probably it would not flourish at once in the fields of Revolution—unless preparation were to be made betimes. [...]
Well, I shall not reach my goal here all at once, but I will prepare myself nevertheless. I cannot compose upon a Scribe- or Dumas-like libretto. [...] I must [...] create something new and I can only do so if I make the whole thing myself. I am therefore looking out for a young French poet sympathetic enough to lend himself to my ideas. I shall make my subject myself and he shall then have as much freedom as possible in writing the French verse. [...] I thank you from my heart for Belloni. He is an excellent, honest and exceedingly energetic man who calls for me every day and leads me on the right road to Parisian fame.
Thus far the more spirited portion of my dispatch—for the rest, this horrible Paris lies like a ton's weight upon me. [...] How alone I am amongst these people! My poor wife—I have still had no news and I grow deathly weak and faint at every remembrance. Send me good news of my wife soon! In spite of courage I am often the most pitiful poltroon! [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 151