My complaint about my sense of loneliness was in no way aimed at Zurich and my friends there. They were one and all so fully agreed to indulge me according to my nature, to accept me and all my doings as I am and as I do, that everything connected with the wholesome expression of my friends' simple Swiss outlook contributed not a little to make me forget my loneliness with them, particularly when I turned my eyes away from the great world. So deeply do I feel the need of putting this right with you that I must tell you briefly who these friends are. My two closest friends, those in particular whose uncommonly ready and delicately proffered support sustained my family for three months, are Wilhelm Baumgartner, pianoforte teacher, a fine, open-minded, cheerful, uncommonly good-natured man, very eager to learn, and Jacob Sulzer, clerk to the canton and first in importance after the mayor, a man of a philosophical, cultured understanding, a noble, convinced, far-seeing radical. Both are still in the twenties. In the second degree come Spyri, a young advocate, open-hearted, very susceptible, enthusiastic and devoted, and Hagenbuch, second State official of the canton, a strong handsome young man, with a wide-awake brain, a sound heart and a vital culture; these are also in the twenties. My old friend Alexander Miiller of Erfurt, settled eighteen years in Zurich as a teacher of music, is an excellent musician and a reliable and devoted friend to me. Unfortunately, too much giving of lessons and nerve-racking ill-health have made him somewhat inaccessible to modern ideas. Besides these nearer friends I have a number of more distant but very pleasant acquaintances. I have often indulged, almost to my detriment, in the pleasure and stimulus of their society.
The people are mighty busy here in Paris, but chiefly with their own affairs and the Jew dealers'! I know no artists, and even Berlioz, though I would willingly forgive him his errors of taste, cannot attract me, since he is Meyerbeer's bondsman. The one man who interests me here is Liszt's secretary, Belloni, who has been put at my service to do business and intrigue for me. He, however, has not been in Paris until to-day. Meanwhile, I have been to see The Prophet for the first time in my life. In the last act I am sorry to say I was distracted by a banker who was holding an uncommonly loud conversation in his box. Apart from this, I was convinced at this 47th performance of the opera of its having won undeniably keen and lasting appreciation from the public of the Paris Grand Opera. The house is always filled to overflowing and the applause more enthusiastic than I have ever known here. I am glad to be able to tell you that I have got on the track of the cause of this illness of mine. It was in great part a nervous disease, or at least it was nervous trouble which produced the constitutional disturbance resulting in the recent threatening physical manifestations.
A little while ago I wrote a long letter to Franz Liszt explaining very thoroughly my reasoned decision not upon any consideration to write an opera for Paris, the most I am willing to do being to take a finished work, one to which I have become indifferent, Lohengrin, and cast it into the arena at the Grand Opera House of Paris to be meddled with and pulled to pieces. As I am not so childish as to suppose this offering would be acceptable and as it is, furthermore, impossible for me to contribute a single stroke of the pen towards the business of offering it, I think I may take it that my dear friends Heine and Fischer will have to forgo the pleasure of seeing a Wagnerian Knight of the Swan swim over the Rhine. It may perhaps be possible to get my Work of Art of the Future translated into French for Paris. It would be as well for me to be up and away out of France before its appearance, as afterwards I should certainly be forcibly ejected. I have also had to abandon my plan of working not only for the Paris of the present but also for the Paris of the future. Apart from the misfortune of my having purely German, not French, instincts, my article would only be accepted in the socialist papers.
After the appearance of the first number I could write you a perfect German Wieland, and the people will some day understand it. I will put down Siegfried and Achilleus in black and white for a happier posterity, the singer is not yet born for these parts.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 167