God knows how it is, but I cannot be really unhappy here. Particularly now that my wife is with me and that I need have no care for my livelihood for the next few months, I am continually as full of high spirits and as much at my ease as a dog that has run off with the whip. The only thing is that I have not lately been able to get at my work again. We have but just succeeded in procuring a small abode for next week and there I shall be able to have a work-room. Hitherto I have only been able to sit down to write in a common-room and you must attribute it to this circumstance that I have dutifully fulfilled your request and finished my Wibelung essay, The Wibelungs. World History from the Saga, for publication.
I now send you this little paper and ask you to have it sent with the accompanying letter to Wigand, the publisher of Leipzig. Wigand is already publishing a brochure of mine, Art and Revolution, the French fortunes of which, in the National, I know nothing of up to date. Get this little essay as soon as it appears. As soon as I get to work again I shall follow it with a more substantial work, The Work of Art of the Future, concluding later still with a third paper, The Artist of the Future. It is, however, absolutely necessary for me to do this work and send it out into the world before I proceed to my purely artistic creations.
If things go as I greatly wish, after the finishing of these tasks I shall compose the music for my Siegfried, which I long to do from the very depths of my heart. I wish I could honourably evade the Parisian operatic schemes imposed upon me. It was really only Liszt who let me in for the trouble. This modern cosmopolitan, who, for the rest, has his good qualities, loves me in a way which makes him want to prepare a gigantic, universal, Parisian success for me. Having of necessity to think of earning, I did not at once dismiss the idea. I let them have their way with me and am now stuck in an absurd dilemma, having to choose between actual friendly offers from Paris and my own inner disinclination.
I want to be happy, and a man is only happy when he is free, and a man is only free who is what he can be and therefore must be. But he who follows not the inner but the outer necessity is subject to coercion, is unfree, a slave, unblest and unhappy. Well then, I do not believe in this Paris opera of mine! But my wife must know nothing of this yet. Tell Hiebendahl particularly from me that I shall assume you have shown him this present letter. I am still superhumanly indebted to him for having been so considerately and nobly silent about a loan, the whole of which I spent on the publication of my operas and which must have seemed to him, with his modest means, far from easily spared.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 160