Heavens, what one goes through on an evening like yesterday's, and how many things ran through my mind! It was a most fateful evening for me. Picture it! With this fantastic opera of mine, so different from anything heard till now, offering, on the face of it, so little that is alluring or popular, I appear before a public absolutely strange to me! I felt it very keenly. There was not a single personal friend in the audience, not a soul prepossessed in my favour. There they all sat, in a spirit of common cold curiosity thinking, "H'm! what kind of a thing can this Flying Dutchman be?" After the overture not a hand stirs; they hear the melancholy first act out with a tense curiosity and amazement, but without knowing what attitude to take up. A singer here and there gets a little applause. Well, I realise just how critical my position is, but I do not despair as I see that the performance is going extraordinarily well. The second act begins and gradually I realise that I have attained my goal. I have netted my audience and, by means of the first act, got them into that curious mood when I can make them follow me hither and thither at will. The interest grows, tension changes to excitement, exaltation, enthusiasm, and before the curtain falls for the second time I enjoy a triumph such as can have fallen to the lot of few. Never yet, not even when Rienzi was produced in Dresden, have I seen and heard such a prolonged outburst of enthusiasm as followed the fall of the curtain here. You could see and hear that in all that crowd of people, high and low, prince, lord and beggar, there was not one who did not shout himself into a frenzy. When I at last appeared with the singers I thought the house would come down! The last act was child's-play. The scenery was most effective, the thing played itself out with a rush and the close, which was very well presented, came with surprising rapidity. Long before the fall of the curtain the uproar broke out anew and seemed to rage on for an eternity before I could disentangle myself from the orchestra and come forward with the singers who were waiting for me again. In short, my dear wife, I have won a remarkable triumph. But this amazing and quite unprecedented victory of mine can only be fully appreciated by those who know all the circumstances, the present state of opera and the absolute novelty and strangeness of my Dutchman. The performance was overpoweringly lovely. They all sang and played like gods. I felt I could gobble them all up!
To-day I am dining with Meyerbeer, to-morrow with Kistner. I have not seen Meyerbeer since the performance. The King was present and someone who watched him all the time tells me that he was uncommonly pleased with it. I have dined once with Mendelssohn who delighted me by coming on the stage after the performance, embracing me and congratulating me very warmly.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 102