[...] To speak frankly, I am sorry that Berlioz still will, or must, undertake the recasting of his Cellini! If I am not mistaken, the work is over twelve years old. Has Berlioz not developed since then, so that he might make something quite different? What a miserable lack of confidence in himself, to have to go back on an earlier work! Bülow has quite rightly demonstrated the weakness of Cellini—it is the poem. [...] Berlioz will never, never do any good with this Cellini. But which is the most important—Cellini—or Berlioz? Let the first go, then, and assist the second! There is something horrible to me in witnessing this attempt at galvanising the dead into life! For heaven's sake let Berlioz only set about writing a new opera! It will be his greatest disaster if he fails to do so, for there is but one thing that can save him—drama, and there is but one thing that can bring him to even deeper ruin—his obstinate avoidance of this only right way out—and this obstinacy will only be strengthened by this taking up of an old attempt in which it was just the dramatist who got him into the difficulties which he is always struggling to overcome by his music.
Believe me I love Berlioz, even though he obstinately and mistrustfully keeps his distance from me. He does not know me but I know him. If I expect anything of anybody I expect it of Berlioz, but not on the road which brought him to the errors of taste of his Faust Symphony, for if he goes farther that way he can only become totally ridiculous. If any musician needs a poet, Berlioz does; and his misfortune is that he is always arranging his poet to suit his musical whims, and distorting now Shakespeare, now Goethe at will. He needs a poet who can fulfil his being, who can constrain him for very rapture, who can be to him what Man is to Woman. It is with dismay that I see this immeasurably gifted artist wrecked on the rock of egotistic isolation. Can I perhaps help him?? You do not want Wieland? I consider it a beautiful poem but, for myself, I cannot execute it now. Will you offer it to Berlioz? Perhaps Henri Blaze would be the man to translate it into French?—
And now, what about Raff? I thought he was engaged on a new work, but no, he is adapting an old one! Are these men not alive? How can an artist create if not out of the stuff of life, and of what artistically-productive import is life if it does not impel the artist to ever fresh creations expressive of life? Can this artificial work upon dead-and-gone impulses be called creative art? What can have become of the fount of all art if the New does not gush forth irresistibly, or even exhaust itself utterly, in new creations? O ye people of God, never mistake this manufacture for Art! What self-complaisance, combined with how much poverty of spirit, is betrayed by this desire to retouch old experiments! If Raff's opera pleased, as you tell me it did, he should be content; and in any case he was better rewarded than I for my Feen, which I never got performed, or for my Liebesverbot, which was performed once abominably, or for my Rienzi, the revival of which is so little in my mind that I would not even give my consent to it if it were suggested anywhere. It is only unwillingly that I concern myself with The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, and then only because I know that, the performances having been imperfect, they are still imperfectly understood. If they had been properly done anywhere, the devil another question would I ask about things which I have passed beyond.
My children, make new things, new things and again new things! If ye cling to what is old, the devil of unproductivity has you and ye are the most miserable of artists!
Well, this was from the heart! Whosoever accuses me of insincerity must answer for it to God—but whosoever accuses me of arrogance is a fool!—[...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 223