At last, at last! After this fatally long silence, you are to get a little pledge of my undiminished love and friendship for you. In every one of the innumerable different phases of mood and feeling which have taken possession of me during our long separation my first desire has always been to share my joys and sorrows with you. Oh, had I but possessed a magic wand to conjure me to you or you to me, you would have seen my very heart laid bare to you! But how can one plough through such oceans of distance upon the slow keel of a pen? Many a time, when pressed to the limit of endurance, I have accomplished half a letter, but I never found it possible to finish one. What is the good of it all!
Now let me give you a cursory sketch of recent happenings in my life. After you left here everything seemed desert and dead. I felt cut off from outward things, whilst the inward life waxed in me all the more strongly. My mother and sisters went to stay in Vienna for a considerable time; I was forsaken of God and of the world! Then my divine Muse of music chose to descend upon me and, believe me, it was under such conditions that I set to work upon my most powerful work up to now, my Symphony, and finished it in the space of six weeks. That completed, the doors of the outer life were opened to me once more. I journeyed to Vienna, stayed there a month, and all was well.
But wait! I went on from Vienna to Pravonin, an estate belonging to Count Pachta in Bohemia. I passed five weeks there in the lap of Nature, of most glorious Nature. Oh, glorious days, for not only Nature but, that I should say it, Love exalted me! Picture Jenny as a paragon of beauty, the ideal of my glowing fancy, and you will know all. My eyes created in her the perfection of all they desired to find, and therein lay my misfortune. I thought I saw my passion returned, and, as a matter of fact, it only needed a bold advance on my part to make sure of such a return on hers!
Well, finally, indeed, it could not, could not last! Finally, of course, my eyes were opened! We travelled to Prague and, alas, you will be able to imagine all the things which can wound a burning passion; that which can kill it is more terrible than all! Conjecture it, then, for yourself and lend me your sympathy: she was unworthy of my love! The chill of death descended on my spirit. Oh, could I then have renounced all fair hopes forthwith, could all feeling have been numbed, I should have counted myself happy! When I sought to warm myself with the last embers of my passion and felt them flicker and pale under the cold breath of death, how hopelessly I gazed into the fiery river of the past, into the glacier of the future. Enough, enough, and more than enough!
For despite the infinite emptiness of my heart, I still have a longing for love and, what enrages me most, I seem to be sound and well from head to foot! Such are the circumstances under which I began the book of my opera Die Hochzeit, and, that finished, returned to Leipzig about a fortnight ago.
3rd January [1833]. I have abandoned the operatic text and torn it up. Soon you shall hear of another.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 4