The Rhinegold is finished, but I am finished too. Just lately I have had, necessarily and purposely, to dull my feelings to all but my work and I have repressed every impulse to write to you before its completion. To-day is the first morning when no pretext restrains me any longer from letting my long-nourished, long-imprisoned wretchedness break forth. My life has passed recently without bringing me once to the very verge of a decision to make an end of my life. Everything in it seems so lost and astray. A too hasty marriage with a woman, estimable but totally unsuited to me, has made me an outlaw for life. For a long time the ordinary pressure of circumstances and ambitious plans, and wishes to relieve that pressure by winning renown, were able to disguise from myself my real emptiness of heart. The truth is that I reached my thirty-sixth year before I completely realised that terrible emptiness. God, how gladly would I flee naked into the world, be nothing, nothing more than a happily loving and beloved man. Well, the latter I can never more be; never more can I love happily, but only unhappily, an outlaw, an impossible person. Dearest friend, ever since, art has been really no more than a matter of secondary importance to me, a mere makeshift, nothing else. I am forced to make shift with it to be able to live at all. Yet actually it is with real despair that again and again I turn to art. For I cannot live like a dog, I cannot bed in straw or satisfy my soul with gin. Mine is a highly susceptible, intense, voracious yet uncommonly sensitive and fastidious sensuality, which must somehow or other be flattered if my mind is to accomplish the agonising labour of calling a non-existent world into being. When I once more took up the plan of the Nibelungs and its actual execution, many things were needed to stimulate me to the requisite mood of artistic ardour; I had to be able to live in better style than recently. In the end I ceased to ask if a thing cost money but just appropriated everything I could think of that could give me a pleasing sensation and bring me into a happy mood. As the year drew to an end it became clear to me that I should want much, very much money to be able to continue in my nest of Philistines much longer. And all this torment, want and trouble about a life that I hate, that I curse.
You must help me now. Things are very bad with me. First of all, however, I must have money. Härtel's have been very open-handed, but what's the use of hundreds to me when I need thousands? To relieve my anxieties and enable me to strike a balance I need three to four thousand thalers. My operas may easily bring in as much in three years. I would lease my copyright to a lender. Well, The Rhinegold is complete, more complete than I thought. With what faith, with what joy I set to work upon the music! I have carried it through and ended it at last in a real rage of despair. Was not I too the slave of the need for gold? Believe me, no composition was ever done like that before; I think my music must be terrible, a maelstrom of horrors and sublimities. Soon I shall make the fair copy black on white and that's probably as far as it will go. Or shall I perhaps let them produce it in Leipzig for twenty louis d'or? I cannot write any more to you to-day. You are the only one to hear this from me; no one else guesses it even, least of all my nearest acquaintances. Something must come of London; I would even go to America to satisfy my future creditor. I would make that sacrifice for the sake of finishing my Nibelungs.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 252