[...] How nonsensical it really is that you torment yourself in order to—help me?? No, indeed! I am not to be helped so—at most perhaps my "renown"—and that is something very different from me! Nothing on paper is of use to me any longer; and yet all my intercourse with the world now is only on paper.—[...] Things cannot go on like this!! I will not endure this life any longer!—
And now I beg you, most urgently and positively—get the Court at Weimar to take some definite step to see, once for all, whether I have a real prospect of seeing the way opened for my return to Germany speedily and soon. [...] Be open with me, quite regardless! Tell me whether the Court of Weimar will take the step, and if it is taken and taken soon—what the answer is. I am not minded to yield in the smallest degree for the sake of attaining my wish. You will accept my assurance that I shall remain a non-participant in politics and anyone who is not a fool must see for himself that I am no "demagogue" in need of police supervision. [...] If a definite refusal is the answer, only tell me quickly and without ceremony; I shall know where I stand then—and I shall begin a quite different life. I shall set out to make money, however and wherever I can. I shall borrow—steal if it comes to the point—so that I can travel. The beautiful parts of Italy, of course, will be closed to me if I am not amnestied, so I shall go to Spain, Andalusia, find travelling companions—and try to live once more as best I can. I should like to go round the world! If I can't raise any money—or if even travel does not breathe the breath of life into me afresh—well—that's the end—and I would rather seek death by my own hand than live on like this!
The truth is that I have come to my thirty-fifth year before realising that up to now I have not lived at all. It was my art that first disclosed to me what a wretched life, barren of love and joy, I have lived hitherto. What will you say when you learn I have never yet enjoyed the true happiness of love? Now I pass my life between privation and a resigned submission to the pettiness of an environment which misunderstands me, and is less and less able to understand me every day [...] I must at least acquire the means to get away from this desert from time to time, that I may give free and untrammelled scope to the life-force within me. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 240