I am coming to see more and more that you really are a great Philosopher, while I by comparison seem to myself nothing but a cheap-jack. Besides my slow progress with my music, my sole preoccupation now is with a man who has come like a gift from heaven to me in my solitude, though only a literary one. This is Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest philosopher since Kant, whose ideas, as he himself expresses it, he is the first to have thought out to a conclusion. Schopenhauer's main conception, the ultimate negation of the will to live, is terribly stern, but in it alone is salvation. Of course it was not new to me, and no one can conceive it at all save he in whom it is inherent, but nevertheless this philosopher is the first to awaken me to fuller consciousness of it.
For the sake of the fairest dream of my life, Young Siegfried, I must still, I suppose, finish the parts of The Nibelungs. The Valkyrie has exhausted me too much for me to be able to forgo this joy-making work. I am in the second half of the last act. I shall not have finished the whole before 1856 and in 1858, the tenth year of my hegira, I can produce it if ever. And now, as I have never in my life tasted the true joy of love, I will set up a memorial to this most lovely of all dreams in which from first to last this love shall for once be satisfied utterly. I have planned out in my mind a Tristan and Isolde, the simplest yet most full-blooded musical conception; then I will wrap myself in the "black banner" which waves over its close and die.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 271