[...] I cannot contradict my new French friends when they regard the possibility, the prospective certainty, that Tannhäuser will make a great impression on the Paris public, as an occasion of unprecedented importance, and ascribe to it a significance beyond all conceivable comparison.
I really cannot blame any cool observer of the life of the talented but incredibly neglected French nation, who is able to take an interest in whatsoever may serve to develop and enable this race, if he sees in the acceptance of a French Tannhäuser a moment of vital import for the cultural capacities of these people. Think how wretched is the condition of all French art, when poetry is really entirely foreign to this race and is only conceived of as eloquence and rhetoric. The complete exclusiveness of the French language, its incapacity to absorb the lacking poetic element by translation from another tongue, leaves only one way open by which poetry can enter, and that is by music. But the Frenchman is not really musical, and all his music has come to him from abroad. From the first the French style of music has developed solely by contact with Italian and German music and is really nothing more than the point of contact of these two styles.
To be accurate, all that Gluck taught the French was to bring music into line with the rhetorical style of French tragédie, in which true poetry has really no part. Consequently, since his time, the Italians have been almost entirely masters of the field; for interest has been centred on rhetorical mannerisms, and has equally neglected true music and true poetry. This neglect, increasing up to the present day, is incredible. [...]
[...] These Paris concerts have put me into an impossible position. I only undertook Brussels in order to ease things a little, but the contrary resulted. [...] I hear not one word from Germany, and if I am ever in my life to see Tristan and The Nibelungs I must devise some miracle to uphold me in the waters of this blessed existence. So, then, I accept the hopes of my Parisian friends, in particular those of my operatic director, and (since all these good things, unfortunately, are still somewhat in the future) I am not at all disinclined to sell myself to a Russian general [von Saburov], who is coming here shortly to persuade me to make a Tannhäuser excursion to St. Petersburg. I invite you to share my mirth! [...]
In the meantime I must cultivate the right mood for—writing a big ballet. What do you say to that? Do you despair of me? Well, you will ask my pardon for that when once you hear and see it. Only this much now—not one note, not one word of Tannhäuser will be altered. But a ballet is imperiously demanded and this ballet is to appear in the second act, because the subscribers to the opera always come to the theatre rather late after a heavy dinner and never at the beginning. Well, I told them that I could not take my orders from the Jockey Club and would withdraw my work. Now, however, I mean to help them out of their difficulty. The opera need not begin till eight o'clock and then they shall have the unholy Venusberg done properly!
This Court of Madame Venus was manifestly the weak part of my work. Lacking a good ballet, I resorted at the time merely to a few coarse pencil-strokes, and thereby missed a great deal. I left the impression of the Venusberg quite flat and indefinite, with the result that an impressive background was missing for the subsequent tragedy. The peremptory reminders and warnings, which come in later and should fill us with a sense of horror (because they are the first indication of the course of the action), failed almost wholly of their effect and significance; fear and persistent foreboding were not induced. But I recognise now that at the time when I wrote Tannhäuser I could not have written the kind of thing that is needed here [...]. Having now written the ultimate transfiguration of Isolde, I can at last find the right close to the overture of The Flying Dutchman, and the horror of this Venusberg. One becomes almighty by degrees if one only goes on playing with the world. Naturally, I shall have to work everything out myself, so that I can prescribe every least nuance to the ballet-master. True, the dance alone can operate and portray here, but what a dance! People will be amazed at all that I have evolved from it. I have made no notes as yet, but I have attempted a few preliminary indications here. Do not be surprised at their occurring in a letter to Elizabeth. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 460