News of Frau Ritter has moved and touched me. My art has always been well received in women's hearts, and the reason probably is that, in spite of the prevailing vulgarity, women still find it difficult to harden their souls as thoroughly as does our world of male citizens, who have achieved this hardness to perfection. Women are the music of life. They accept a thing more frankly, more implicitly, and add beauty to it by their sympathy.
While I was still awaiting news from Bordeaux I was surprised by a sum of money sent from Dresden through Herr Paetz. I immediately wrote back to him expressing as well as I could the feelings called up in me by this token of love and sympathy from someone I scarcely knew. If such experiences make any man feel good, exalted and joyful, they have an absolutely beatifying effect on me. I have never found the consciousness of freedom so pleasant as now and am well assured of the fact that only loving association with others gives freedom. If the help of Frau Laussot should save me from the need of earning for a few years, these years will be the most decisive of my life, especially of my artistic career, for I can now face even Paris calmly and worthily, whereas formerly the fear of being driven to concessions by my practical wants completely spoiled in advance every step I took in the Paris business. Well then, on January 16th, 1850, I go to Paris. A few overtures of mine are already in rehearsal there and I shall take my finished opera plan for Wieland the Smith. First I shall dispute the five-act opera form, and then the rule that there must be a special ballet in every grand opera. If I succeed in inspiring Gustave Vaez with enthusiasm, getting him to understand my views and making him want to carry the thing through with me, well and good, but if not, I shall go on looking till I find the right poet.
Do not make so much of my last work, The Work of Art of the Future, but I should be a fool to attempt to deny that I am very pleased it has made a hit with you. I cannot but laugh when I think how determined I was after that composition never again to write in like vein. Now the impulse wells up in me on every hand to write again. To be quite fair, we must admit that it is the only sensible and useful thing to do at present. The work of art cannot be created now, it can only be prepared for, and that by revolution, by the destruction and overthrow of all the things which deserve destruction and overthrow. That is our work and men other than we will be the first true creative artists. It is only in this light that I regard my approaching activities in Paris. Any work, even, which I write for Paris and produce there, can be only an incident in the revolution, a sign affirming destruction. Destruction alone is necessary; construction at present can only be arbitrary. I have still an immense deal to say to those before whom I have laid my Work of Art of the Future.
I have much to write shortly to Karl Ritter. Test and see, then, if he has anything like a good voice. Were I his age now, were I what he is and had I as much voice as I had at one time, I would certainly become a performer. As performer, poet and composer in one I would have tried even in a time of complete calm to revolutionise the whole drama. For who has the practical power to do it except the performer? Just think, dear friend, if Tichatschek had all my qualifications as well, or if I had his voice, what would the condition of the theatre be to-day? Our cursed abstract writing and composing is the devil and all; we will, and cannot!
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 165