I come back to it that you seem to me to be happier in your lot than I am in mine. Every line of your letter shows me that you are in health. I assure you of my joyful amazement at it. That you can write me a five-page letter assures me, too, of an improvement in your personal conditions for which I am heartily glad, even though I must assert that I can imagine circumstances in which I could refuse any and every amelioration of existence without grieving very much for what I was renouncing. One thing excels all others: freedom. But what is freedom? Is it licence, as our politicians believe? No indeed. Freedom is integrity. Whosoever is true, that is, completely at one with his nature in accordance with the law of his being, he is free. Outward compulsion only really attains its end when it destroys the integrity of its victim, when the latter becomes a hypocrite and tries to make himself and others believe him other than he really is. That is true slavery. But the victim of constraint need never let it come to this, and the man who preserves his integrity even under compulsion preserves his essential freedom also; at least he is certainly more free than one who no longer notices the constraint of which our world is full, because his soul is wholly submissive, and who has defaced himself by submission. I believe that this integrity is in essence the whole of that truth spoken of in our philosophies and theologies.
Therefore to be consumed with love of absolute truth is to surrender oneself to absolute reality upon the emotional side, to experience the joys and sorrows of the begetting, growth and blossom time of life, its withering and dissolution, refusing nothing, desiring life only that we may live in delight and in anguish and so die. This alone is to be consumed with love of truth. But to make this self-immolation possible we must utterly abandon the search for the whole. The whole only reveals itself to us through separate phenomena, for it is these alone that we are able to perceive in the full sense of the word. We can only really understand a phenomenon when we can let ourselves be wholly absorbed in it, as we must also be able to absorb it wholly into us. How is this marvellous process most fully achieved? Only through love. Everything which I am unable to love remains outside myself and I outside it; the philosopher may flatter himself that he understands this, but not the real man. Now the full reality of love is only possible between the sexes. It is only as man and woman that we mortals can love most really, whilst all other loves are mere derivatives, originating in it, connected with it, or aesthetic counterfeits of it.
Enough. I dare send you this confession in your loneliness without fear of awakening distress in you by thus imparting my views. Not you alone, but I too and all of us are living at present under circumstances and in conditions which only permit of substitutes and makeshifts. For you no less than for me, the truest, most real love can only be a concept, an aspiration. I have come to my thirty-sixth year before divining the true meaning of the aesthetic impulse in myself. Till then, I took art to be the end and life the means. It only remains to describe what, from my point of view, I cannot but feel bound to do in order to draw myself and mankind nearer to the goal which I have descried, without the use of those means which I have once and for all forsworn. My art is to help me to do it, and the particular work of art which I have to frame to this end is my Nibelung poem. For me that poem means the representation of reality as defined above. Instead of the words about the gods and the Ring, I would now have Erda say only that all that is has an end, that a dark day dawns for the gods, and that the Ring should be shunned.
We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word; dread of the end is the source of all lovelessness and it is engendered only where love is already fading. How came it that this highest blessing of all things living so vanished from the race of men that at last all the acts of humanity came to be rooted and grounded solely in fear of the end? My poem supplies the answer. It shows Nature as she really is, undistorted, all her actual various antitheses comprising things mutually repellent. But the ultimate source of disaster is not in Alberich's repulse by the Rhine Maidens. Alberich and his Ring could not harm the gods were these not already ripe for evil. Where, then, is the root of this evil? Look at the first scene between Wotan and Fricka which leads finally to the second act of The Valkyrie. The strong chain which binds those two, forged from love's instinctive error in desiring to prolong itself through inevitable change, in asking mutual guarantees in opposition to the law of eternal transmutation and renewal in the world of phenomena, constrains them both to the mutual torment of lovelessness. Accordingly the whole course of the drama demonstrates the necessity of recognising and submitting to the multiplicity, the ever-changing aspects, the eternal renewals of reality and of life. Wotan rises to the tragic dignity of willing his own destruction. This is the whole lesson we have to learn from human history: to will the thing that must be and ourselves to fulfil it. The creative power of this highest, self-annihilating will finds ultimate issue in Siegfried, the man fearless and steadfast in love. That is all. In detail the poem tells of the power of evil, the true poison of love, under the similitude of the gold, stolen from Nature and misused, the Nibelung Ring. The curse resting upon the Ring can never be lifted till it is restored to Nature, till the Gold is once again sunk in the waters of the Rhine. Experience is everything. Siegfried alone, man by himself, is not the perfect man. He is but the half and not till Brynhilde is with him does he become a saviour. One solitary cannot do everything; numbers are needed, and suffering, self-immolating woman is at length the true and conscious saviour; for love is indeed the eternal feminine itself.
So much for the universal and greatest aspects of the drama. In detail I cannot but think that you likewise have taken this to be my meaning, only it seems to me that you attribute more value to the middle and intermediary members of the great chain than really belongs to them as such, and, moreover, that you had been driven to do this in order to justify from my poem a preconceived philosophy peculiar to you. On the whole I do not accept certain objections made by you on the score of lack of clarity in specified instances. On the contrary, I believe it was a true instinct that has led me to guard against an excessive zeal for making things clear, for I have felt unmistakably that to make my intention too obvious would be to hinder a proper understanding; in drama, as in art generally, the way to produce an effect is not by a statement of opinion but by a presentation of the instinctive. And this is just what distinguishes my poetic matter from the political matter which at present monopolises the field. What most astonishes me, coming from you, is the question why the gods perish even when the Rhinegold is restored. I believe that a good production of the drama would completely satisfy the simplest mind on this point. The downfall of the gods does not proceed from counterpoints or things that can generally be explained, twisted and turned. No, we feel in our inmost souls, as does Wotan, that their destruction is of necessity. The object was, then, to justify this necessity emotionally, and this happens quite naturally if the whole action of the drama with all its simple and natural motives is followed sympathetically from beginning to end. When Wotan at last declares this necessity, he is only saying what we ourselves have already recognised. The composition now complete of the difficult and momentous Rhinegold has brought me once again a great sense of certitude, but I perceive anew how much there is, by the very nature of my poetic intent, that can be revealed through the music alone. I can no longer look at the poem without music. In time I think I shall be able to tell you about the composition. For the present, only this much: it has become a close-knit unity; there will be scarcely an orchestral note which does not proceed from a preconceived motive.
How I am ever to achieve production is a tremendous problem, to be sure. Still, I shall make the attempt in due time, as I can see before me no other adequate object in life. I feel fairly certain that the purely mechanical side of the enterprise could be contrived. But my performers? There I heave a deep sigh. Of course I must insist upon young players not yet entirely spoiled by our operatic stage. I would not even consider so-called celebrities. I shall have to see first how I am to train my young people. I should prefer to have my company together for a year without letting them appear in public, work with them day by day, give them a humane and artistic training and let them ripen gradually for their task. Accordingly I could not look for a first performance before the summer of 1858 even under the most favourable conditions. Let the time be as long as it will, however, I feel a constant urge to give myself a reason for living through intense concentration on a goal of my very own. I am not so out of touch with Nature as you think, even though I am no longer personally in a position for scientific intercourse with her. Herwegh has to do this on my behalf. He lives here too and has long pursued nature studies very thoroughly, and through him, my friend, I learn very beautiful and important things about Nature, who governs me in the many and great things of life. It is only when she is supposed to take the place for me of life itself, that is, love, that I turn from her.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 255