You are a friend—that I must say! Let me say no more, for though I have always recognised friendship between man and man as the noblest and most splendid of human relationships, you have realised this idea for me completely, so that I have no longer only to imagine, but may feel and understand what a friend can be.—[...] Having found you, I am not only consoled for my banishment from Germany but must even see my banishment as a piece of good fortune, for I could not possibly have done so well for myself in Germany as you can do for me. But only you could have done it! [...]
[...] In all our work as poets and composers we only will to do something, we cannot do it. Only in representation have we the actual ability to do—Art. Believe me, I should be ten times happier were I a dramatic performer instead of a dramatic poet and composer. This being my belief, I can no longer care to create works for which I have deliberately to renounce all hope of life in the present, in return for some flattering, fictitious future immortality. What cannot be made actual to-day will never become actual in the future. I no longer vainly dream of creating for the future, passing over the present, but if I am to create for the present it must, to be sure, show me a less repellent face than it does at the moment. I renounce fame, especially the crazy wraith of fame in posterity, because I love mankind much too well to condemn it for my vanity's sake to that bankruptcy in which alone flourishes the posthumous fame of the departed. As things are, I am allured no longer by ambition but by a longing to share myself with my friends, the wish to please them, the desire for artistic creation. When I feel this longing and this wish satisfied I am happy and perfectly content. [...] Last May I sent the poem of my Siegfried to a bookseller for publication—just as it is. In a short preface I make it clear that I have no hope of either the completion or the performance of this work, and therefore lay it before my friends simply as an uncompleted project. In fact, I will not compose my Siegfried to give it to the four winds, for the reasons I have just told you. Now you talk to me of an association of artists which might be able to bring Siegfried to birth—but I must have performers for my heroes such as our stage has not yet seen. Whence are they to come? Well, not out of the sky, of course, but out of the earth. I believe you are really in the vein to grow them out of the ground for me by sheer enthusiastic cultivation! [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 181