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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 22, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Agnes Street-Klindworth | Paris | 112 |
Awaiting news of his amnesty through Seebach, Wagner hopes to produce Tristan in Vienna or Dresden before the Paris Tannhäuser rehearsals, failing which a trip to Switzerland will be his only relaxation.
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| May 22, 1860* | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | Paris | 360 |
Moved by Berlioz's article on Fidelio, Wagner tells Liszt that, despite Berlioz's estrangement under a bad wife's influence, he has written to him, for only men of high talent—Liszt, Berlioz and himself—have anything in common.
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| May 23, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 1,674 |
The morning after his forty-seventh birthday, moved to tears by the portraits of Mathilde and Otto she sent from Rome, Wagner describes the radiant day before: a clear sky that made him feel the gods loved him, a conciliatory note of thanks he sent Berlioz for an article on Fidelio, his painful estrangement from Liszt because of Princess Wittgenstein's intrusion into their letters, and Jupiter shining at evening. He tells the story of the Brussels photograph he means to send her, the best of his portraits, unlike the Paris one that makes him look "like a sentimental Marat."
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| May 23, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 193 |
Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck that he still finds Liszt wholly lovable but has stopped writing to him because their intimacies are always exposed to the Princess, under whose influence Liszt has become a man without secrets.
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| May 31, 1860 | Franz Liszt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 646 |
Liszt longs to be in Paris with Wagner's Ring and Tristan, describes the room where Wagner's bust stands alone beside a picture of St. Francis, and announces that the Princess's great life-question has been favourably settled in Rome. He advises patience during the Paris Tannhäuser rehearsals and, against Devrient's verdict, offers to stage Tristan at Weimar in 1861.
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| June 5, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 476 |
Wagner tells Otto Wesendonck that the Paris Tannhäuser is moving forward under imperial favour while every way to Tristan is barred, that he has refused a lucrative St. Petersburg offer to stay true to Paris, and that he will give up his Rue Newton house.
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| June 6, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Eduard Avenarius | Paris | 195 |
Cotta having declined the Ring poem, Wagner renews his request that Eduard Avenarius take charge of finding a publisher, and reproaches Cäcilie for never having visited him in eleven years of exile.
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| June 8, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Julie Ritter | Paris | 1,106 |
Wagner complains to Julie Ritter that Germany is content to regard Tristan as unperformable, while the Saxon ambassador may help with his amnesty. He describes how Napoleon III ordered Tannhäuser for the Paris Opéra at Princess Metternich's request, giving him full command of its resources, and finds French audiences and critics more receptive than German ones.
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| June 15, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | Paris | 107 |
Wagner asks Liszt to induce Dingelstedt to reply promptly about the Weimar honorarium, which he needs for Minna's summer cure, insisting on no less than 1,000 francs.
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| June 17, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 403 |
Enclosing a receipt, Wagner confesses that he used Schott's fee for Das Rheingold, already sold to Wesendonck, to meet the 11,000-franc cost of his Paris concerts, expecting to repay him from a Petersburg engagement that has now fallen through, and asks that the sum for the last part of the Ring be counted as that repayment.
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| June 17, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 304 |
Wagner confesses to Otto Wesendonck that he spent Schott's fee for The Rhinegold, owed to Wesendonck, on his Paris concert losses, and offers instead the copyright of the last part of the Nibelungs, which he still means to finish.
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| June 20, 1860* | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | Paris | 236 |
Dingelstedt has offered only thirty louis d'or instead of the thousand francs Wagner asked, and Wagner, who has insisted on his demand but needs the money to send Minna to Soden, asks Liszt to find a diplomatic middle course.
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| June 22, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Malwida von Meysenbug | Paris | 1,258 |
Destitute despite his Paris prospects, Wagner tells Malwida von Meysenbug that he has refused to add a ballet to Tannhäuser, that his older operas are exhausted and his newer ones thwarted, and that only Mme Schwabe has truly helped him. He finds distraction in Garibaldi's campaign and Plutarch's life of Timoleon.
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| June 22, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Malwida von Meysenbug | Paris | 1,007 |
Wagner explains his long silence by the ironical gift of total impecuniousness joined to an obstinate temperament, recounts his refusal to add a second-act ballet to Tannhäuser, the collapse of the Petersburg plan and the Paris subscription, praises Madame S. as the only one who truly helped, and reflects on Plutarch's Timoleon and on Garibaldi as a fly in the European spider's web.
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| June 22, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Malwida von Meysenbug | Paris | 737 |
Wagner tells Malwida von Meysenbug of his desperate finances, his refusal to accept a ballet in Act II of Tannhäuser, his gratitude to Madame Szemere, and his eager following of Garibaldi, whom he likens to Plutarch's fortunate Timoleon.
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| June 24, 1860 | Franz Liszt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 214 |
Unwell and tired, Liszt reports that he could obtain no more than Dingelstedt's offer for Rienzi and advises Wagner to accept it, hoping to get a few hundred francs more after the performance, for which new scenery is being prepared. Wagner's photograph has at last arrived.
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| July 10, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Ferdinand Heine | Paris | 451 |
Preparing Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra, Wagner asks Heine to send his costume designs and the scenery sketches, perhaps from Berlin, where the Tournament Hall is said to be fine, to Alphonse Royer, and jokes that Heine's designs are now wanted in Paris as models. Unable to leave Paris for his health, with Minna at Soden, he confesses himself heavy at heart, though thought fortunate from afar.
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| July 15, 1860* | Franz Liszt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 410 |
Liszt rejoices at Madame Kalergi's generous help with Wagner's concert debts, wishes him luck with the Paris Tannhäuser rehearsals, and mourns the death of his devoted friend Clara Riese. Rienzi will be taken in hand in September, and Härtel will soon publish the last two Symphonic Poems, Hamlet and The Battle of the Huns.
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| July 21, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Joseph Tichatschek | Paris | 221 |
Eight months before the Paris Tannhäuser, Wagner laments that Dresden, where the best singers for his works are, remains closed to him, and scorns the idea of a reconciliation with the hostile conductor Rietz.
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| July 22, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 1,169 |
In a dark mood under persistent south-west winds, Wagner writes of his utter joylessness and resignation: the world takes him for a hypocrite and a grasping man, his bitterness has turned to a tranquil contempt, and only his sense of purity, of having wrought for others alone, sustains him. The news of his partial amnesty, reopening Germany to him, leaves him cold, a new field of suffering. His solace is Schopenhauer, who turns sorrow into cognition and contempt into love, and the little dog Fips, his companion on walks in the Bois de Boulogne.
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| July 22, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 1,037 |
Wagner tells Mathilde that he has resigned himself to a joyless existence in which bitterness has given way to a peaceful contempt sustained by the sense of his own purity. The news that his exile has been partly lifted leaves him cold, and his only friends are Schopenhauer's book and the little dog she once sent him.
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| July 22, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Hans von Bülow | Paris | 226 |
Wagner tells Bülow he is rewriting the Venusberg scene of Tannhäuser for Paris, with new music for the opening bacchanal and an enlarged role for Venus, and that he accepts a French translation in honour of the Emperor, the only prince to give him a hearing.
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| July 22, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 223 |
Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck that joy means nothing to him now, that the news of his partial amnesty left him cold, and that his best friends are Schopenhauer and the little dog she once sent him.
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| August 1, 1860* | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 1,353 |
Revising the French Tannhäuser, Wagner finds its poem unalterable and plans to rewrite the Venus scene. Rereading his poems, he explains Lohengrin through the doctrine of metempsychosis as a continuation of Parzival, with The Victors as its conclusion, marvels at Tristan, and sketches his new conception of Kundry as both the wild messenger of the Grail and the enchantress of Act II.
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| August 1, 1860* | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 531 |
Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck that translating Tannhäuser has shown him how unalterable his poems are, interprets Lohengrin through Buddhist rebirth as linked to Parzival and The Victors, marvels anew at Tristan, and feels Parzival ripening within him.
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| August 3, 1860* | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 1,254 |
Translating Tannhäuser word by word for Paris has convinced Wagner that the poem could not have been done better; only the music, and above all the Venus scene, needs recasting. Reading prose translations of his dramas, he finds Lohengrin the most tragic of all and, through the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, sees Lohengrin as the continuation of Parzival, with Elsa reaching up to him in rebirth, as Savitri overtakes Ananda in his projected Die Sieger. He marvels anew at Tristan, and reveals that Parsifal's wild Grail messenger and the temptress of the second act are one and the same woman, sketching her restless, craving nature.
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| August 10, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 1,333 |
A second sheet written days later: amid joyless monotony and full resignation, Wagner finds a light springing up within, the "Tristanesque Night." He reflects that his career deceives onlookers, who mistake for his own aims undertakings alien to him, shudders at the prospect of finding a German home for Tristan now that Germany is open to him, and sees the Paris Tannhäuser as a breathing-space. In place of more on Parzival he retells, with admiration for its "whole men," the old Breton tale of Erec and Enide.
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| August 11, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Agnes Street-Klindworth | Paris | 784 |
Thanking Agnes Street-Klindworth for her faithful friendship, Wagner explains that he will produce Tannhäuser in Paris only for inner satisfaction and without compromise, plans to see the Princess of Prussia at Coblenz under his partial amnesty, laments Liszt's dependence on the Princess Wittgenstein, and reflects that though Germany is now open to him he has no sanctuary for his art.
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| August 13, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Eduard Avenarius | Soden | 337 |
Wagner tells Eduard Avenarius that he distrusts publishers' profit-sharing, citing Härtel's claim to have made nothing from Lohengrin, and asks for safeguards before Weber publishes the Ring poem.
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| August 13, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | Frankfurt | 170 |
Wagner arranges to meet Liszt at Baden-Baden, where he will wait on the Princess of Prussia, whose intercession has at last moved the King of Saxony to relent, and sound her on help with his new works.
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| August 14, 1860 | Franz Liszt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 358 |
Liszt approves Wagner's visit of thanks to the Princess of Prussia at Baden-Baden but declines to meet him there for a hurried meeting, for reasons he will not give. He notes the Wiesbaden Lohengrin with Niemann and the Grand Duke's interest in seeing Wagner at Weimar on a suitable occasion.
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| August 17, 1860 | Countess Hacke | Richard Wagner | Baden-Baden | 31 |
The lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Prussia summons Wagner to the Trinkhalle, where the Princess will speak with him.
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| August 23, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 415 |
With Tannhäuser rehearsals about to begin, Wagner reports recasting the Venus scene and the Venusberg ballet, describes waiting on the Princess of Prussia at Baden-Baden and seeing the Rhine and the Drachenfels for the first time, and admits he felt no spark of emotion at retreading German soil.
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| August 23, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 130 |
Wagner tells Otto Wesendonck of his overwork, his audience with the Princess of Prussia at Baden-Baden, his reluctance to pursue a Berlin production, and his surprise at feeling nothing on setting foot again on German soil.
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| September 13, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | Paris | 2,056 |
Wagner explains his brief Rhine trip and the partial amnesty that allows him into German states only with Saxon consent, and suggests Hanover for Tristan. He describes the Paris Tannhäuser, backed by an imperial command, as the first triumph of his art he has witnessed, with excellent singers, a fine translation, and a rewritten Venus scene, and confesses his alienation from Germany: 'if I am German it is because I carry my Germany along with me.'
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| September 13, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | Paris | 1,250 |
Wagner explains that he is not amnestied, only permitted to enter German states for performances with Saxon consent, and that Tristan's premiere might best go to the King of Hanover. In Paris, by imperial decree, he has unprecedented resources for Tannhäuser, is reworking the Venus scene and ballet, has written a preface for the prose translation of his poems, and declares that Germans have no fatherland.
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| September 13, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | Paris | 1,192 |
Wagner tells Liszt that his friendship will always draw him to Weimar, explains his limited amnesty, considers Hanover for Tristan, reports on the Paris Tannhäuser revisions and his preface for Villot, confesses he feels no German fatherland, and regrets Bülow's annoyance and Liszt's reported depression.
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| September 20, 1860 | Hans von Bülow | Richard Wagner | Berlin | 887 |
Bülow eagerly agrees to go to Karlsruhe as rehearsal pianist for the hoped-for Tristan, whatever the pay, and asks whether Wagner has received and approved Act I of his piano score. He showers the newly arrived Parisian with practical advice and introductions, from a good cheap dining club to Gounod and Countess Charnacé, and reports on Berlin tenors and the untapped royalties in Rienzi.
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| September 21, 1860 | Franz Liszt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 990 |
Delighted that Wagner has forgiven his absence, Liszt expects to visit him in Paris before Wagner comes to Weimar, approves Hanover for Tristan though the King dislikes him, and mocks German theatres for fleeing from Tristan. He has used Wagner's account of the Paris preparations in Brendel's paper and asks him to publish the German original of his preface to the French translation.
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| September 30, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 1,895 |
Wagner confesses he has not yet visited the Louvre while Mathilde revels in Raphael, and tells the parable of his two Indian songbirds: the male lost his melody at summer's end, while one morning the hen suddenly sang hers perfectly again, prompting him to wonder to whom melody belongs. He describes the exemplary rehearsals for the Paris Tannhäuser with Niemann, Sax, Tedesco and Morelli, his rewriting of the Venus scene in a "feminine-ecstatic" vein he could not command before, a possible Lohengrin in English for Queen Victoria, his lost lawsuit and move to the Rue d'Aumale, and encloses the opening of the new Venus verses.
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| September 30, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 747 |
Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck he is composing new music for Venus, describes the meticulous Paris Tannhäuser rehearsals and his cast—Niemann, Mlle. Sax, Madame Tedesco, Morelli—and explains that he now can portray ecstatic femininity as he could not when he first wrote the work.
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| October 15, 1860 | Hans von Bülow | Richard Wagner | Berlin | 886 |
Bülow announces the birth on 12 October of his and Cosima's first daughter, to be christened Daniela Senta, and offers her to Wagner's service, perhaps one day as an Isolde. He reports a sold-out Berlin Lohengrin, doubts that Tristan will be taken up in Berlin, and passes on Liszt's hopes that the Princess's marriage dispensation has finally been granted in Rome.
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| October 20, 1860 | Hans von Bülow | Richard Wagner | Berlin | 541 |
Delighted by Wagner's news of daily rehearsals for the Paris Tannhäuser, Bülow suggests the Dresden baritone Hardtmuth as a reserve Wolfram. He reports that Liszt has hurried to Vienna to defeat intrigues against the Rome decision on his marriage, describes preparations in Weimar for Liszt's birthday, and passes on news of Bronsart, Dräseke's impending deafness and Tausig.
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| October 20, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 874 |
From his new rooms in the Rue d'Aumale, Wagner chides the Wesendoncks for their silence, recounts weeks of literary work, a newly composed Tannhäuser scene, a vexatious removal and daily rehearsals, and praises the unprecedented zeal and exactitude of the Paris Opéra's preparations, urging his friends to come and see the most perfect performance he can ever offer them.
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| October 20, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 127 |
Wagner praises to Otto Wesendonck the zeal and exactitude of the Tannhäuser rehearsals at the Paris Opéra, unmatched by any theatre he has known, and the excellence of its officials and chorus-master.
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| October 24, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 216 |
A hurried note of relief at Mathilde's latest lines: Wagner explains that her missing letter was probably withheld by the servant he had just dismissed, who habitually carried his letters about for days, and complains of the unremitting strain of the Paris rehearsals.
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| November 11, 1860 | Hans von Bülow | Richard Wagner | Berlin | 410 |
Bülow sends half of his new arrangement of the Faust Overture, asks for Wagner's essays or a fresh copy of the Ring poem as a present, reports Liszt's and Joachim's movements, and promises to unsettle Dorn over the Berlin Tannhäuser.
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| November 13, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 197 |
A brief bulletin during Wagner's slow recovery from a severe nervous fever that interrupted the Tannhäuser rehearsals: for several days he was almost blind, and he is now weak and emaciated, but has taken a drive and a short walk on the Champs-Élysées, and has hung her three Roman prints around his couch.
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| November 13, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 77 |
Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck that he is slowly recovering from a severe illness which for some days left him almost blind, and that he is weak, thin and hollow-eyed.
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| November 17, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 419 |
Still slowly mending, Wagner reports that the vocal score of Tristan has appeared and that he is having Mathilde's copy specially bound in Paris, as a combined birthday and Christmas gift. He describes himself as becalmed and "dead," without wish or zeal, plans to return to rehearsals, and congratulates her on her new little dog.
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