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.

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Showing all years in February (208 total)

Date	From	To	Place	Words	Subject
February 8, 1835	Richard Wagner	Theodor Apel	Magdeburg	207	Wagner explains to the impatient Apel that the première of Columbus must be postponed to Monday because the scenery is not ready, and reports the triumphant revival of Auber's La Muette de Portici, in which Minna joined the chorus.
February 4, 1837*	Richard Wagner	Giacomo Meyerbeer	Königsberg	1,357	Introducing himself to Meyerbeer, whom he hails as the embodiment of the German artist's task in uniting Italian and French merits, Wagner explains that he has sent Scribe a scenario for a grand opera and the score of Das Liebesverbot. He begs Meyerbeer to examine the score and help him to Paris and the Opéra-Comique.
February 1, 1839*	Richard Wagner	Johann Hoffmann	Riga	744	Wagner asks Johann Hoffmann, who has taken over the Riga theatre from Holtei, to write off his salary advance in return for taking on the duties of the dismissed music director Lobmann, which lie outside his contract, offering to undertake any work 'with the sole exception of boot-cleaning and water-carrying'.
February 5, 1842*	Richard Wagner	Robert Schumann	Paris	1,359	Wagner explains to Schumann that he will leave Paris in March although the Rienzi premiere is postponed, and recommends Anders as a Paris correspondent for the Neue Zeitschrift. He sends notes on Halévy's Reine de Chypre and on Paris taste: Berlioz ruined yet sublime in his July Symphony, the Opéra-Comique debased by Italian sentimentalism, and virtuosity everywhere, urging Germans to break free of Paris.
February 5, 1842*	Richard Wagner	Wilhelm Fischer	Paris	1,253	Wagner thanks Fischer for declaring that Rienzi must not come out under unfavourable circumstances: a perfect first performance matters more to him than speed, and Dresden's performances, not its public, are what he values. He deplores the Intendant's vacillation and the instability of the German repertoire, asks that nothing else be studied before his opera once Schröder-Devrient returns, and announces his intention of coming to Germany about Easter.
February 25, 1843	Richard Wagner	Robert Schumann	Dresden	1,305	Wagner assures Schumann that Dresden taste has moved beyond Bellini to serious works, as the warm reception of The Flying Dutchman shows, and angrily rejects Schumann's remark that parts of it smack of Meyerbeer, whose music turns his stomach. He complains of hostile or indifferent critics, including Banck and Härtel's journal, and praises Schumann's Quintet.
February 25, 1843	Richard Wagner	Robert Schumann	Dresden	788	Wagner assures Schumann that Dresden taste has moved beyond Bellini and would welcome his music, citing the reception of The Flying Dutchman; he is incensed by Schumann's remark that he sometimes smacks of Meyerbeer, a 'death sentence' on his creativity, and praises the Piano Quintet: 'Beauty! In it alone is salvation.'
February 26, 1843	Richard Wagner	Ernst Benedikt Kietz	Dresden	275	Newly appointed royal Kapellmeister at 1,500 thaler, Wagner berates Kietz for two months' silence about the dying Lehrs, mentions Laube's biography of him with Kietz's lithograph portrait, and asks for a hundred copies of his song "The Two Grenadiers" from Schlesinger.
February 15, 1844	Richard Wagner	Eduard Avenarius	Dresden	198	Now publishing his operas with Meser, Wagner asks Eduard Avenarius whether he would act as nominal French copyright-holder by depositing piano scores in Paris on the day of their German publication.
February 4, 1845	Richard Wagner	Louis Spohr	Dresden	205	Welcoming Spohr's return to operatic composition, Wagner deplores younger German composers who despair of German uniqueness and blend Auber's piquancy with Donizetti's vocalism in pursuit of superficial success, lacking faith in what is genuine and true.
February 4, 1845	Richard Wagner	Louis Spohr	Dresden	354	Wagner welcomes Spohr's offer to conduct his new opera The Crusades at Dresden, deploring younger German composers who try to blend Auber's spice and Donizetti's tunefulness into a cosmopolitan hotch-potch that pleases no one.
February 1, 1846	Richard Wagner	Ernst Benedikt Kietz	Dresden	220	A letter of introduction for Wagner's brother Albert and niece Johanna, who is going to Paris to perfect her singing, with an apology to Kietz for sending no money: amid Dresden gossip Wagner can barely keep up appearances, and all is not gold that glitters.
February 1, 1846	Richard Wagner	Gottfried Engelbert Anders	Dresden	211	Wagner complains to Anders that Germany has brought him fame but no income, so that his thoughts are turning once more to Paris, and declines to recommend his niece Johanna to Schlesinger, whom he calls a lecherous old goat.
February 8, 1849	Richard Wagner	Ferdinand von Zigesar	Dresden	400	Wagner thanks the Weimar intendant von Zigesar for his letter about the forthcoming Tannhäuser, blaming the public's shallow taste on generations of theatrical mis-education rather than on Weimar alone. Unable to attend, he expresses confidence in the diligence and goodwill of the Weimar company and especially of Liszt.
February 9, 1849	Franz Liszt	Richard Wagner	Weimar	88	Liszt invites Wagner to the final rehearsal and first Weimar performance of Tannhäuser on 15 and 16 February, describing the zeal and growing admiration with which the work is being studied. He thanks Wagner for the Faust overture.
February 20, 1849	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Dresden	659	Wagner pours out his gratitude to Liszt for the Weimar Tannhäuser, the first production anywhere outside Dresden, praising his total devotion to a friend's work. The news has rescued him from despair after a gross insult by the Dresden management that nearly drove him to abandon art for manual labour.
February 20, 1849	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Dresden	219	Wagner thanks Liszt for staging Tannhäuser at Weimar when no other theatre would touch it, and for seeking to win him friends, confessing that the same week Lüttichau's affronts had almost driven him to abandon art for a labourer's bread.
February 25, 1849	Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein	Richard Wagner	Weimar	356	Princess Carolyne Wittgenstein adds her voice to the chorus of admiration for Tannhäuser, praising the music's power to express the finest shades of passion, the sirens' enchantments, and the soul's cries of grief. She regrets that Wagner did not come to Weimar and hopes to thank him in person.
February 25, 1849	Richard Wagner	Cäcilie Avenarius	Dresden	134	Wagner reports Tannhäuser's unparalleled success in Weimar and the Grand Duke's pressing invitation, and plans a visit to Thuringia, the Harz and perhaps Leipzig in May, 'if the world has not been destroyed before then' by Germany's princes.
February 25, 1849	Richard Wagner	Cäcilie Avenarius	Dresden	103	In a jesting birthday letter to Cäcilie, Wagner reports that Minna has taken to baking with great success while he practises the Latin script, so that they may at least get through life with dexterity.
February 26, 1849	Franz Liszt	Richard Wagner	Weimar	522	Liszt modestly deflects Wagner's thanks, declaring himself one of Wagner's most devoted admirers, and reports on press coverage of the Weimar Tannhäuser. He announces his intention to arrange the overture and the 'Abendstern' song for piano and asks where the latter should be published.
February 3, 1850	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Paris	503	Newly arrived in Paris to pursue opera prospects, Wagner reports that Belloni is still in Weimar and Liszt's bill is not yet payable. After a sleepless night beneath a singer practising I Puritani and an exhausting lodging hunt, he has found a quiet room in a cité and hopes to begin translating his Wieland scenario.
February 6, 1850	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Paris	819	Newly arrived in Paris in a state of nervous exhaustion, Wagner thanks Liszt for an encouraging letter, explains that Belloni is absent, and describes the subject of his projected Paris opera, Wieland der Schmied, the free artist who forges wings to fly from his misery, proposing that he and Belloni form a team to win success.
February 8, 1850	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Paris	520	Ill and sleepless in Paris, Wagner has met Semper, promises "Art and Climate" to the Deutsche Monatsschrift, and resolves to publish his own Papers for Art and Life. He explains that, hearing Heubner had been condemned to death, he had urged a Dresden lady to beg the King for clemency, and plans to write to his three friends imprisoned at Königstein.
February 8, 1850	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Paris	311	From Paris Wagner tells Uhlig of writings planned or promised: an article on art and climate, a periodical of his own, and regrets over the separate publication of The Wibelungs. He explains that the rumour of a letter to the King may stem from his plea to Frau von Lüttichau to save Heubner from execution.
February 9, 1850	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Paris	1,094	Wagner describes his recovery in a new Paris lodging after nights disturbed by a neighbour reading the papers aloud, his necessary purchases of clothes, and cheap dinners with Kietz and Anders. Repelled by Parisian egoism, he awaits Belloni and the concerts featuring his overtures, and longs to return to Minna and their pets in Zurich.
February 9, 1850	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Paris	320	Learning that Seghers's Société Sainte-Cécile cannot afford to copy orchestral parts, Wagner urgently asks Liszt to have Meser in Dresden send the engraved parts of the Tannhäuser Overture to Paris by rail, since he himself no longer has any rights in his published music.
February 13, 1850	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Paris	768	Regretting that he came to Paris a month too soon, Wagner reluctantly agrees to Minna's wish to keep their Zurich lodgings, though he urges her to consider an upper-floor suite. He reports a reassuring letter from Bordeaux, where friends offer to relieve him of financial anxiety so that he may remain true to his art.
February 13, 1850	Richard Wagner	Ernst Benedikt Kietz	Paris	45	A rude, half-abbreviated summons to Kietz to be at Truffaut's without fail that day and to bring back the libretto of Lohengrin.
February 14, 1850	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Paris	291	Wagner approves Minna's choice of new lodgings at Herr Müller's in Zurich, preferring an upper floor and a warmable bedroom. Still low and listless while awaiting Belloni, he passes on greetings from Anders and Kietz, including a little poem Anders has made in her honour.
February 22, 1850	Richard Wagner	Jakob Sulzer	Paris	179	Arrived in Paris weeks too early, Wagner tells Sulzer that he is ill with revulsion at the city, caught between his inner aversion and the importunity of friends and wife, and insists that only activity in accord with one's true being brings happiness.
February 24, 1850	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Paris	479	Wagner reports seeing Meyerbeer's Le Prophète at its 47th performance and acknowledges its undeniable success. He has realized his illness was emotional and, in a letter to Jessie Laussot, refused to write an opera for Paris, offering at most Lohengrin; after hearing his Tannhäuser Overture he will go south to Bordeaux.
February 24, 1850	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Paris	1,518	Annoyed that Wigand has left him waiting for his honorarium, Wagner introduces his Zurich friends Baumgartner, Sulzer, Spyri, Hagenbuch and Alexander Müller. He has seen Le Prophète at its forty-seventh performance and owns its great success, diagnoses his illness as melancholy, and announces that he will under no condition write an opera for Paris; he will instead write a German Wiland from the Alps.
February 24, 1850	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Paris	805	Wagner describes his Zurich friends Baumgartner, Sulzer, Spyri, Hagenbuch and Alexander Müller to Uhlig, reports seeing Meyerbeer's Le Prophète at its 47th Paris performance, and announces his decision never to write an opera for Paris, offering at most Lohengrin; he will write a truly German Wieland in the Alps.
February 2, 1851	Richard Wagner	Hermann Brockhaus	Zurich	247	Wagner tells his brother-in-law Hermann Brockhaus that he has never been happier than since leaving his Dresden post, knowing his best work will earn love rather than money, and asks that Heinrich Brockhaus treat his confiscated library as a pledge rather than as repayment.
February 5, 1851*	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Zurich	894	Sending the second part of Oper und Drama, Wagner corrects "histeric" to "hysteric," hopes to get sixty louis d'or for the book, and weighs J. J. Weber, whose reactionary Volkskalender gives him pause, against Kolatschek's offer to approach Kühtmann. He praises Uhlig's article on instrumental music and thinks of dedicating the book "To thinking musicians and poets."
February 15, 1851*	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Zurich	582	Sending the last of Oper und Drama ("Here you have my will; now I can die"), Wagner tells of the death of his beloved parrot, which he had shut out from his writing-table on the eve of finishing the copy. Grief-stricken, he declares that pleasure in art is impossible to him and that his art-work is mere fantastic self-deception, and leaves the business of publication to Uhlig.
February 18, 1851	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Zurich	377	Lonely and fearing that Liszt is angry over a misunderstanding with B. about his Lohengrin article, Wagner asks for news of Brussels. He announces that Opera and Drama is finished but lacks a publisher, plans an edition of his three romantic opera poems, and mourns the death of his parrot, the 'good brownie' of his house.
February 18, 1851	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Zurich	134	Wagner announces that his 'very thick book', Opera and Drama, is finished but without a publisher, that he will edit his three Romantic opera poems with an introduction, and that he hopes to begin composing Siegfried in the spring, though his love of life is small and he feels dead and forgotten.
February 18, 1851	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Zurich	225	Lonely and fearing Liszt is angry over a misunderstanding with Biedenfeld, Wagner announces that Opera and Drama is finished, that he will next edit his three romantic opera poems with a long introduction, and that he hopes to begin Siegfried in spring; he drops the subject of Wieland.
February 6, 1852*	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Zurich	2,131	Apologizing for his many commissions and for meddling in the christening, Wagner reports Tannhäuser's success at Schwerin, plans a signed note on his Zurich performance of the Coriolan overture, and says the Flying Dutchman is being seriously prepared. He encloses his newspaper review of Wilhelm Baumgartner's songs, contrasting fashionable song-writing with settings that grow from the poem, and hoping Baumgartner will find his poet in Gottfried Keller.
February 13, 1852*	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Zurich	1,866	Sending his programme note on the Coriolanus Overture, Wagner outlines an article for Uhlig to write: Beethoven's orchestral works are tone-poems representing a poetic object, which conductors who see only the music cannot convey. Only a tone-poet can identify and communicate that object, as Wagner did with the Ninth in Dresden and the Eroica in Zurich, and the aim of it all is drama.
February 15, 1852	Richard Wagner	Hans von Bülow	Zurich	815	Sending his account of the Coriolanus Overture, Wagner advises Bülow to seek the graphic core of his Romeo and Juliet overture in the finale of Bellini's libretto rather than in Shakespeare, the historian: hatred as an all-pervasive passion from which love springs and by which it is consumed. He argues that all plastic arts derive from architecture, which grows out of life's needs, and that the theatre will be the temple of the future.
February 15, 1852	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Zurich	2,636	Sending his programme note on the Coriolan overture, Wagner outlines an article for Uhlig: Beethoven's great works are poems with a real subject, which absolute musicians who seek only the "How" and not the "What" cannot convey; a tone-poet must interpret that subject for players and public, and the goal is the drama. He criticizes Mendelssohn's purely musical, over-fast Beethoven conducting, sends an addition on the Grenzboten for Brendel, and asks for a Dutchman score.
February 15, 1852	Richard Wagner	Hans von Bülow	Zurich	353	Rebuking Bülow for his 'architect', Wagner argues that architecture arises from human need and reaches its highest work in the service of poetry, that there is no absolute work of architecture any more than any absolute art, and that the theatre will be the future's equivalent of temple and church.
February 24, 1852	Richard Wagner	Ernst Benedikt Kietz	Zurich	60	Wagner asks Kietz to deliver at once a letter to the physician Lindemann containing a medical consultation, declaring that he will write no more books but, with Lindemann's help, the complete Siegfried.
February 26, 1852*	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Zurich	193	Wagner reports new acquaintances in Zurich, notably the rich young merchant Otto Wesendonck and his very pretty wife, who has taken a fancy to him through his preface to the opera poems, and assures Uhlig that there will be no more 'scandals', though women remain his only source of illusion.
February 26, 1852	Richard Wagner	Theodor Uhlig	Zurich	1,512	Tannhäuser has triumphed at Schwerin and Leipzig is inquiring; the Zurich Dutchman is postponed, but the Tannhäuser overture is in rehearsal with a reinforced orchestra and a programme explanation. Wagner describes his reworking of Don Juan, insists that Beethoven has been universally misunderstood as music without a poetic subject, and mentions playing with "soap-bubbles" among the charming women of Zurich society.
February 3, 1853	Richard Wagner	Ferdinand Heine	Zurich	93	A brief request that Heine lend, or sell cheaply, his Tannhäuser costume-pictures to the small but well-disposed theatre at Freiburg in Baden, which is in a desperate hurry, with a promise that the Lohengrin staging work will soon follow.
February 11, 1853	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Zurich	1,757	Wagner sends copies of his privately printed Ring of the Nibelung poem, asking Liszt to present de luxe copies to the Grand Duchess and the Princess of Prussia and to distribute others to friends. Ill and in despair over his isolation, he proposes that the Weimar court obtain a safe-conduct for a brief visit so he can hear Lohengrin before composing the music, rails against the German theatres, and welcomes the return of his Berlin score.
No letters found.

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