Wagner's Letters
Correspondence by, to, and around Richard Wagner
Wagner’s letters run from a seventeen-year-old offering a publisher his piano arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth to a note from Venice a month before his death. Written to patrons, friends, lovers, singers and creditors, they are less guarded than anything he published. They follow his hopes for art from the revolutionary years in Dresden and Zurich, through Schopenhauer and his love for Mathilde Wesendonck, to King Ludwig, Bayreuth and Parsifal.
The letters are arranged by date and can be browsed by correspondent, so that Wagner’s side may be read alongside the replies of Liszt, Nietzsche, Minna Wagner and others. These letters have been compiled from available English-language collections; some letters may be repeated in translations by different translators.
In the letters the thought of the prose is lived: plans conceived, defended, abandoned and reborn amid poverty, exile and scandal. One conviction holds throughout, that art is a matter of life and death and not a trade. What changes is what he hoped art would accomplish. In Dresden and Zurich it is the festival of a free humanity, upheld by a Feuerbachian faith in love. From 1854 Schopenhauer turns it toward renunciation and compassion, a turn the letters to Mathilde Wesendonck give an almost devotional intensity. With King Ludwig it becomes a mission he believed he had been sent to fulfil, and at Bayreuth a sacred stage, ending with Parsifal, which he called his farewell to the world.
The apprentice years. The earliest letters, from Leipzig, Würzburg, Magdeburg and Riga, are those of an ambitious young theatre musician in the spirit of Young Germany, an “epicure” in art who wanted “nothing for posterity, everything for contemporaries.” They chart his courtship of the actress Minna Planer, debts, flights from creditors, and a hunger for Paris and Italy. Paris from 1839 brought hunger of a more literal kind: pawned rings, begging letters, fawning appeals to Meyerbeer, and a hatred of money as “the curse that destroys whatever is noble.” Out of that misery came the first statement of a lifelong faith. Writing to Kietz in 1842, he asked what would have become of him had he not thrown himself “with ever growing faith into the arms of Art,” and added, “I know now who I am.”
Dresden and revolution. The triumph of Rienzi in 1842 made him Kapellmeister at the Saxon court, and the letters of the next years show him striking out “a way markedly different” with The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. He described the last as the contact between “a metaphysical phenomenon and human nature, and the impossibility that such contact will last.” Self-publishing his scores ruined him, quarrels with the court theatre multiplied, and contempt for the modern stage hardened into politics: “the means we must use is Revolution!” he wrote in 1847. During the May uprising of 1849 he told Minna that he and his comrades were revolutionaries “only in order to construct something on fresh ground.” A warrant followed, and with it exile.
Zurich and the artwork of the future. The Zurich letters, above all to Liszt, Theodor Uhlig and August Röckel, are the workshop of the theoretical writings and the Ring. Their faith is humanist and Feuerbachian. “My God is my art and the principle of beauty, nobility, and truth,” he told Ferdinand Heine in 1849, and against Liszt’s plea that he find salvation in Christ he answered in 1853, “I believe in mankind, and require nothing further.” He imagined the Ring performed in a temporary theatre on the Rhine after the revolution, before a public admitted free, to make clear “the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense.” Yet beside the hope runs a darker refrain: art, he wrote, “begins at precisely the point where life breaks off,” a substitute for the love life denied him. The great letter to Röckel of January 1854 reads the Ring as a drama of love against power, in which Wotan rises “to the tragic heights of willing his own destruction” and the lesson is “We must learn to die.”
Schopenhauer, Wesendonck and Tristan. In December 1854 he told Liszt that Schopenhauer had come “like a gift from heaven,” and that his “final negation of the desire of life” showed “the only salvation possible.” In the same letter he conceived Tristan und Isolde as a monument to a love he had never known. Later letters to Röckel reread his own operas through the new philosophy, finding in them since the Dutchman “the sublime tragedy of renunciation.” His love for Mathilde Wesendonck, his neighbour at the Asyl from 1857, became the living form of this thought. When the household broke apart in 1858 he wrote to her of the only salvation left: “Rest from longing! The stilling of every desire!” In Venice he finished the second act of Tristan, confessing to Bülow that “were I not an artist, I could become a saint.”
The wandering years. From 1859 to 1864 the letters follow him from Lucerne, where Tristan was completed, to Paris and the fiasco of Tannhäuser at the Opéra in 1861, then to Biebrich, where Die Meistersinger began as a kind of rescue, and to Vienna, where Tristan was abandoned after more than seventy rehearsals. His final renunciation of Mathilde, his separation from Minna, mounting debts and a flight from Vienna to escape his creditors brought him by the spring of 1864 close to despair.
Ludwig, Munich and Tribschen. In May 1864 the eighteen-year-old King Ludwig II of Bavaria summoned him to Munich and paid his debts. The letters between them are among the strangest in the collection, ecstatic on both sides; Wagner wrote that the King had been sent to him “by God in order that my belief shall become a religion.” Tristan was performed in 1865, but the death of its Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr, the scandal of his affair with Cosima von Bülow and court hostility forced him out of Munich that December. At Tribschen near Lucerne, where he lived with Cosima from 1866, he finished Die Meistersinger, performed in Munich in 1868, returned to the Ring, married Cosima in 1870, and found in the young Friedrich Nietzsche a disciple who saw him as the renewer of Greek tragedy.
Bayreuth. The festival he had imagined in Zurich took shape in the small Franconian town he chose in 1871 as a neutral place, “a kind of Washington of art.” The letters of the next five years are largely business: fundraising, patrons’ certificates, singers asked to serve “simply and solely” an artistic ideal for expenses only, a near collapse rescued by a royal loan in 1874. The first Ring of 1876 left a large deficit and deep disillusion. His enterprise, he told Heckel, had been a question put to the German public, “Will you?”, and he now assumed that they would not. Nietzsche, who in 1876 still celebrated each May as the anniversary of his “spiritual rebirth,” broke with him in 1878, and Wagner’s letters thereafter speak of him with pained bewilderment. Retreating into Parsifal, which he finished in 1882 and reserved for Bayreuth alone, Wagner spoke of himself as a man looking down on the world “as though from a cloud.” His last letter to Ludwig, from Venice in January 1883, calls the work “my farewell to life.”
Spirituality. The letters show that Wagner’s religious thought was not a late conversion but a lifelong search, and that it was always bound up with art. In Paris and Dresden art itself was his faith. In Zurich that faith took a communal and this-worldly form: love was the only redeemer, and the festival he dreamed of was a religious gathering without a church, answering a need that, as he put it in 1852, “can no longer be ecclesiastically religious.”
Schopenhauer gave this search a metaphysics, and with it an Eastern vocabulary. To Röckel in 1855 he described compassion with all that lives as “the root of all virtue” and “the true secret of redemption,” and wrote that the Buddha “spoke the language which most nearly gives expression to that lofty enlightenment.” “If you wish to find out my religion,” he told Mathilde Wesendonck, “read Usinar,” a legend from the Indian epics. He planned a Buddhist drama, Die Sieger, and in his Venice diary for her wrote that he had “involuntarily become a Buddhist.” Seeing an animal tormented, he told Jakob Sulzer, lifted “the veil of Maya” and gave him an insight into “the essence of life itself.” His love for Mathilde he described in the same terms: love was “the well-spring of my redemption,” and “only inside, within us, only deep down does salvation dwell.”
From the 1860s Christ moves to the centre without the Eastern strand disappearing. Writing to Ludwig on Good Friday 1865, he contrasted the God of power with the God who suffers and dwells in the heart, and in 1873 he said Parzival was meant “to preserve the world’s profoundest secret, the truest Christian faith, nay, to awaken that faith anew.” His Christianity remained heterodox. In 1879 he wrote to Constantin Frantz that the way from man to God “is compassion, and its everlasting name is Jesus,” and in 1880 he told Hans von Wolzogen that they must be “merciless in abandoning the Church and the priesthood” for the sake of a purified Christ. The Brahmin teaching stayed with him: joining an animal-protection society in 1879, he urged that people be reminded of “the Brahman’s great saying, ‘Tat twam asi’ (‘That art thou’),” as a way of ennobling Christianity. Die Sieger was set aside only because, as he wrote in 1882, Parsifal had absorbed it.
The response he wanted from his audience followed from this. From the start he insisted that drama speak to feeling rather than reflection, and in 1853 he wrote, “I do not proffer easy entertainment, I deal in terror and pity.” In 1875 he told his performers that the Greeks could celebrate art in the name of Apollo, but “we no longer had any gods.” By 1880 he called Parsifal “the most sacred of my works,” a drama in which “the most sublime mysteries of the Christian faith are openly presented,” and resolved that it should never be offered “as an amusement.” Bayreuth was to be a consecrated stage, and the experience he hoped for was less conversion than an awakening of compassion. In his last years, having lost hope in Germany and the age, he described his inner life as “a world not of hope but of trust.”
Antisemitism. Hostility to Jews runs through the letters from the 1830s to the end, often joined to his resentment of money, the press and rivals. It sharpened around Judaism in Music (1850), when he told Liszt that his hatred of Jewry was “as necessary to my nature as gall is to the blood,” and he defended the pamphlet’s reissue in 1869. In the Schopenhauer letters he identified Judaism with the worldly optimism he rejected and claimed it had distorted Christianity, and in later letters he blamed Jews, often alongside Jesuits, for the degeneration of German culture. Late letters adopt racial language influenced by Gobineau, and in 1881 he told Ludwig that he considered the Jewish race “the born enemy of pure humanity and all that is noble in man.” At the same time he worked closely with Jewish musicians and impresarios, among them Carl Tausig, Joseph Rubinstein, Angelo Neumann and Hermann Levi, who conducted the first Parsifal, and in 1881 he disclaimed any connection with the organized antisemitic movement then active in Berlin.
Because the collection contains thousands of letters, the table below is intended as a finding aid rather than a replacement for the individual letter pages. Use the filters to narrow the archive by year, month, correspondent, or direction, then open a letter to read the full text.
Note: An asterisk (*) next to the date indicates an exact date for the letter was unavailable and a date has been interpolated from context and ordering.
| Date | From | To | Place | Words | Subject |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| March 21, 1855* | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | London | 894 |
Wagner tells Wesendonck not to try to make him 'independent', hinting that he may soon abandon his art altogether. He describes visiting the Mendelssohn-connected Beneckes, his friendship with the violinist Sainton, who secured his invitation on the strength of his writings, his dislike of the sheep-like English, and the young Klindworth, who looks every inch a Siegfried.
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| March 21, 1855* | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | London | 1,984 |
Conducting the Philharmonic season in London, Wagner confesses he has nothing to do among the shrewd but unartistic English, rejects advice to court the critics Davison and Chorley, laments the meagre Lohengrin extracts and two inadequate rehearsals for the Ninth Symphony, tells Wesendonck to give up trying to make him "independent", and describes his few friends there, Sainton, Lüders and Klindworth.
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| March 21, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | London | 1,163 |
Wagner reports to Otto Wesendonck that London offers him nothing but a comfortable conductorship: the Queen's taste is trivial, the public indifferent, rehearsals too few, and his Lohengrin extracts pirated. He gives up hope of independence and praises his only friends there, the violinist Sainton and young Klindworth.
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| March 22, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,374 |
Wagner calls his London stay a penal servitude: too few rehearsals and wretched choruses make a worthy Ninth Symphony impossible. He describes his Érard grand and standing desk, his frugal diet of roast beef and oysters, the high cost of everything, Semper's visit, and his indifference to the Times' attacks, and explains his decision to let Berlin have Tannhäuser.
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| March 26, 1855* | Richard Wagner | Wilhelm Fischer | London | 203 |
Wagner asks Fischer to tell the Dresden cloth-merchant Henniger that he will be paid in one lump in the autumn, preferably without interest, and asks whether Liszt has sent on the Rheingold score. The Philharmonic orchestra and public like him; that day's concert brings selections from Lohengrin and the Ninth Symphony, with a wretched chorus.
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| March 27, 1855* | Franz Liszt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 454 |
Liszt reports accepting Härtel's twenty louis d'or for the Faust overture, takes the Berlin outcome calmly, and has sent the Rhinegold score to Fischer in Dresden. He is at work on his Gran Mass and reports Weimar performances of Schumann's Genoveva, Kühmstedt's oratorio and Raff's music, wondering whether the death of the Tsar may soften his personal fate.
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| March 27, 1855 | Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 204 |
On red-bordered paper, the Princess reflects that its colour symbolises love, royalty and blood, fitting both Wagner's sovereign genius and her own ardent attachment, and assures him of their love and blessings during his London stay.
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| March 27, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,324 |
In better humour, Wagner reports the second Philharmonic concert: the Freischütz overture was encored, the Lohengrin excerpts held the audience spellbound and won a storm of applause, and the Ninth Symphony, though bewildering some, was hailed by Benecke as revelatory. He relates comic reactions from the audience and longs for his Zurich home.
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| March 30, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 850 |
Wagner scoffs at faith in English solidity, compares a respectable Sacred Harmonic Society Requiem under Costa with a dreadful New Philharmonic concert under Wylde, and confesses the struggle it cost him to let Berlin have Tannhäuser without Liszt. He laments that only Jews and scamps make money as artists, but reports receiving 50 pounds for the first two concerts.
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| April 4, 1855* | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | London | 1,104 |
Wagner regrets settling the Berlin affair rashly out of financial need and wonders whether he should write to the King of Prussia to secure Liszt's invitation. He finds his London position false and humiliating, rehearsals too few and the press hostile, and has only just finished scoring the first act of the Valkyrie; he envies Liszt's Weimar solitude.
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| April 5, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | London | 151 |
Late in the evening, Wagner writes that Klindworth has just played him Liszt's great B minor Sonata, which he finds beautiful beyond anything, grand and sweet, deep and noble, and which made him forget his London misery.
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| April 5, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,360 |
Wagner describes his daily life in London in detail: the coal smoke and cold that have ruined his voice, his modest rooms near Regent's Park, his meals and bills, dinners with Praeger, Sainton and the tedious Beneckes, the Zoo, and his conviction that London holds nothing for him beyond a little money to bring home.
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| April 5, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | London | 971 |
Wagner scorns the venal London press, especially Davison of The Times and Chorley, who attack him to keep him in his place, and questions what he is doing there performing symphonies. He mocks the slipshod concerts of the New Philharmonic and the English religious devotion to oratorio, for which Mendelssohn is to the English what Jehovah is to the Jews.
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| April 5, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | London | 186 |
Having just heard Klindworth play Liszt's B minor Sonata, Wagner writes at once to say that it is beautiful beyond belief, great, deep and noble, and that it has made him forget all his London troubles; he praises Klindworth as worthy of the work.
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| April 5, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | London | 1,997 |
Replying to "Uncle" Wesendonck, Wagner dismisses a Punch jibe about promissory notes, insists he expects nothing from English "music" or business, describes the corrupt London press and the hostile critics, mocks the English devotion to oratorio and Mendelssohn, sketches the large Mendelssohnian B. family at Camberwell, and reports slow progress scoring Die Walküre.
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| April 5, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | London | 150 |
Wagner tells Liszt that Klindworth has just played him his great Sonata, 'beautiful beyond belief', making him forget all his London wretchedness.
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| April 5, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | London | 451 |
Wagner tells Otto Wesendonck that the London public applauds anything, that the venal press is beneath notice, that the English worship oratorio and Mendelssohn as Jehovah, and that he has barely finished Act I of The Valkyrie in score.
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| April 7, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,189 |
Wagner rebuts Minna's suspicions, fed by Semper's jocular reports, that he is living extravagantly in London, and protests her confusion over Hülsen's advance. He mocks the Philharmonic's choice of Spohr and Mendelssohn symphonies and the London audience, describes the lions and birds at the Zoo, and tells of Klindworth playing a Liszt sonata.
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| April 11, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,123 |
In better spirits before a rehearsal, Wagner has secured Beethoven's C minor symphony and the Euryanthe overture for the next concert. He describes the Crystal Palace, a visit from Edward Röckel, an evening at the Marylebone theatre seeing The Merry Wives of Windsor, and a cheap dinner near London Bridge, and asks Minna to make him a splendid dressing-gown.
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| April 17, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,899 |
After the third concert, Wagner describes conducting Mendelssohn in white gloves and then removing them for the Euryanthe overture, and silently waiting out the departing audience before the Water-carrier overture. He plans a matinée for the gifted, press-savaged Klindworth, asks Minna to make him a silk summer suit, reports Hülsen's advance, and is moved to tears by a nightingale in the park.
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| April 20, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 956 |
Wagner humorously describes a lion's dawn roar replacing his nightingale, a street band playing 'Guter Mond,' and a New Zealand songbird at the Zoo. He recounts being jostled by crowds greeting Napoleon III and the Queen on their way to Fidelio, explains his weekly budget from the Wesendonck money, and reports that the Tannhäuser overture will be given at the next concert.
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| April 20, 1855* | Richard Wagner | Wilhelm Fischer | London | 176 |
A short note congratulating Ernestine, urging Fischer to make Wölfel finish the Rheingold copy so that the original score reaches London by the end of May, and thanking him for settling with Henniger. Enduring London "like a passover lamb," Wagner hopes never to return.
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| April 25, 1855 | Minna Wagner | Richard Wagner | Zurich | 259 |
Minna's draft letter to her "Englishman," written two months to the day after his departure for London, counts down the remaining concerts and longs for their reunion on the Seelisberg, threatening to slap the next Englishman who tries to take him away. The close of the draft is illegible.
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| April 26, 1855* | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,084 |
Lamenting the folly of accepting the London engagement, Wagner disputes Minna's complaints about missing letters and other trifles, and despairs of the trivial concert programmes. He describes his one choice acquaintance, the admiring amateur Ellerton, a deadly Messiah, Klindworth's piano arrangement of Die Walküre's first act, and an enjoyable pantomime at the Adelphi, vowing never to return to England.
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| April 27, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Ernst Benedikt Kietz | London | 754 |
To Kietz in Paris, Wagner regrets having come to London: he has nothing to do but conduct eight concerts, will save little after taxes and creditors, lists his few acquaintances, scorns the Mendelssohnian press, and tells how he conducted a Mendelssohn symphony in gloves.
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| April 28, 1855* | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 121 |
A brief note, written just before Wagner conducted Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, sending Minna and Wesendonck copies of the second concert's program by the hand of the departing Eschenburg.
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| April 30, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | London | 411 |
From his unhappy season conducting the Philharmonic in London, Wagner urges the ailing Mathilde to read Holtzmann's Indian Legends, especially Savitri and Usinar, the key to his religion. He reports reading Dante's Inferno each morning while composing the second act of Die Walküre, and resolves to give up public conducting altogether in order to finish his great work.
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| April 30, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | London | 189 |
Wagner urges the ailing Mathilde Wesendonck to read Holtzmann's Indian Sagas, especially 'Savitri' and 'Usinar', reports reading Dante's Inferno each morning while scoring Act II of The Valkyrie, and resolves to give up public concert conducting.
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| May 1, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 755 |
After an idiotic fourth concert of directors' symphonies, Spohr, Onslow and a Meyerbeer aria, Wagner resolved to resign his engagement, but was talked out of it by Lüders and the Praegers over oysters and punch, chiefly for Minna's sake. He grumbles at the coming programme of English symphonies, plans a trip to Bath with Eduard Röckel, and longs for home.
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| May 1, 1855* | Richard Wagner | August Röckel | London | 2,995 |
Writing from London, Wagner answers Röckel's 'obstinate optimism' with an exposition of Schopenhauer: the subjectivity of phenomena, the Will as blind self-consuming striving, compassion as the root of virtue, and redemption through the Will's negation, linked to Buddhism and set against a hostile caricature of Judaism. He then laments the under-rehearsed Philharmonic concerts and longs to return to Switzerland.
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| May 2, 1855 | Franz Liszt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 333 |
Liszt has finished his Mass, which he says he 'prayed rather than composed', and promises to bring it and his symphonic poems to Zurich in September. He counsels patience and resignation in the face of English and German Philistinism and thanks Wagner for his kindness to Klindworth and for his words on the Sonata.
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| May 4, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 2,250 |
In a long letter Wagner defends Mathilde Wesendonck against the gossip of Zurich ladies and assures Minna that any mistrust touching her honour is groundless. He reports buying summer clothes, a demonstrative encore for a Weber overture, Ney's cold Fidelio, Charlotte Cushman's Romeo, and the comic genius Robson, and explains how the Times critic Davison, said to be in Meyerbeer's pay, has helped him by printing a translation of Lohengrin.
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| May 4, 1855 | Minna Wagner | Richard Wagner | Zurich | 142 |
In what appears to be a draft, Minna sympathizes with her "poor, little husband," agreeing that the London directors had no business bringing him over to conduct trashy local compositions instead of the classical music promised.
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| May 4, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,255 |
Wagner defends Mathilde Wesendonck to Minna against the gossip of Zurich ladies, assuring her that her suspicions are baseless. He laughs at the alleged gong in his Tannhäuser Overture and reports London musical life, including the critic Davison's hostility.
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| May 7, 1855 | Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 205 |
Sympathising with Wagner's London suffering, the Princess asks him for a signed autograph of Brünnhilde's lines on love from the Ring, 'Nicht Gut, nicht Gold', which she says seem written in the purest blood of her veins.
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| May 8, 1855* | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,481 |
Counting the weeks until his departure on 26 June, Wagner describes the Philharmonic orchestra as mostly English players, technically sound but wooden, praising only the Belgian bassoonist, the oboist and the leader Sainton. He scorns the correct but uninspired English symphonies he must conduct, reports his persistent catarrh and silk under-vests, and laments how slowly his Walküre composition is progressing.
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| May 8, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 565 |
Nine weeks into his London 'dog's life', Wagner describes to Minna the Philharmonic orchestra as skilled but machine-like Englishmen, praising only a Belgian bassoonist, the oboist and his leader Sainton, and mocks the correct but unimaginative English compositions he must conduct.
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| May 10, 1855* | Richard Wagner | Jakob Sulzer | London | 1,705 |
Wagner tells Sulzer that London has only confirmed his contempt for the public world of art, and describes how his artistic nature, like a daemon, repeatedly draws him back into a world whose nullity he has recognized, while moments of compassion, such as at the sight of a tormented animal, lift the veil of Maya. He observes England's political decline and says he has renounced his former universal hopes.
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| May 10, 1855* | Richard Wagner | Wilhelm Fischer | London | 1,144 |
Alarmed by Fischer's news about X.'s position, Wagner asks him to warn the creditors' lawyer that the publishing rights must be properly protected or he will appoint his own. His old operas are now only a source of money; the Ring is written for a future festival, not existing theatres, and finding true singers will be the real difficulty. He wants the Rheingold score sent to London, finds conducting the Philharmonic concerts a folly, and reports hearing Jenny Ney.
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| May 11, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 356 |
Distressed to learn that Minna has run short of money because Hülsen's advance from Berlin is delayed, Wagner explains his arrangements with Sulzer, asks Anderson for another £50, and promises to send 1,000 francs for Wesendonck at once.
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| May 15, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,753 |
Answering Minna's bitterness over a money crisis at Zurich, Wagner explains that Sulzer's promised help and Hülsen's delayed advance were to blame, and that he has sent 1000 francs via Anderson. He details London's costs to rebut her notion of a pleasure-filled life, reports a packed fifth concert where the Tannhäuser overture was hissed by a few and applauded by many, and mentions the admiring Ellerton.
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| May 16, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | London | 1,035 |
Living in London 'like one of the lost souls in hell', Wagner calls his acceptance of the Philharmonic post a sin, chafing at English concert conventions, a machine-like orchestra, an impassive public, and Mendelssohn worship. Only Dante, whose Inferno he has passed through, and a few friends sustain him; he will not finish the Valkyrie score in London and longs for Liszt's September visit.
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| May 16, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | London | 842 |
Living 'like a damned soul in hell' in London, Wagner calls the engagement a sin that has reduced him to conducting English concert programmes amid etiquette, a mechanical orchestra, an impassive public and the Mendelssohn cult. He stays only for Minna's sake, cannot work on The Valkyrie, and is reading Dante, hoping to pass from purgatory to paradise and find his Beatrice.
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| May 16, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | London | 506 |
Living 'like a damned soul in hell' in London, Wagner tells Liszt that he has lost all desire to work and will not finish even Act II of The Valkyrie there, finds consolation in Dante and in friends such as Klindworth, Sainton, Lüders, Praeger and Ellerton, and congratulates Liszt on his Gran Mass.
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| May 19, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 774 |
Opening with a wry birthday rhyme, Wagner frets that Sulzer has not acknowledged the bill of exchange and is irritated by a stale tailor's bill from Riga. He patiently explains once more how his debt to Karl Ritter was settled out of his allowance, and agrees to spend a week in Zurich before going to Seelisberg.
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| May 19, 1855 | Otto Wesendonck | Richard Wagner | Zurich | 413 |
A birthday letter to Wagner in London, in which Otto Wesendonck shares his friend's burden, urges him to scorn the vulgarities he meets and to decide for himself whether to stay or leave, and greets the "daring minstrel" with verses anticipating his triumphant return; Mathilde sends a purse.
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| May 22, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,589 |
Distressed by news of Minna's illness on his birthday, Wagner apologises for his recent testy letters, caused by her money straits, now resolved by Hülsen's remittance. He describes his poor digestion and lonely routine, his small band of English admirers, an American inquiry about conducting in New York which he rejects, and his amusement at a photograph of Minna with Peps.
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| May 22, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | London | 956 |
Written on his birthday, Wagner's last London letter compares him to a caged tiger longing for home, absolves Wesendonck of blame for advising the trip, reflects that the world and he are two stubborn heads, resolves to keep clear of routine concert-conducting, mentions a tentative invitation to New York, and insists on calling the new Wesendonck villa "Wesenheim".
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| May 22, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | London | 365 |
Restless as a caged tiger, Wagner assures Otto Wesendonck that he does not blame him for advising the London trip, explains that he is in the world not to make money but to create, and mentions an inquiry from New York that threatens 'a second edition of London'.
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| May 25, 1855 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | London | 1,084 |
Relieved that Minna is recovering, Wagner teases her about her feverish verses and confesses his dull, heavy state: he will bring back only half of Die Walküre's second act. He mocks the coming sixth concert's programme, relieved only by Leonora and Beethoven's violin concerto with Sainton, describes an English folding chair for her to copy, and recounts his lonely birthday.
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