First of all, best of men, let me tell you of my amazement at your immense productivity! And so you have a Dante Symphony in your head now? And you hope to place it before me completed by the autumn? Don't take my amazement over this marvel amiss. When I look back on your activities these last few years you seem quite superhuman and there really is something very strange about it. Well then, a Divina Commedia? That is certainly a most glorious idea, and even now I am enjoying your music in anticipation. Yet I have something to say to you about it.
I do not doubt for a single moment that the Inferno and Purgatorio will be successful; about the Paradiso, on the contrary, I have misgivings, which you are justifying already in my opinion by including choruses in your scheme. In the Ninth Symphony, as a work of art, the last movement with choruses is decidedly the weakest part; it is important merely in the history of aesthetics, because it discloses in a very simple manner the embarrassment of a true tone-poet who, after Hell and Purgatory, does not know how to represent Paradise. And indeed, dearest Franz, there is a very real difficulty about this Paradise, and who should show us that more plainly than Dante himself, the singer of the Paradiso, which is definitely the weakest part of his Divine Comedy.
I am doing no more here than telling you faithfully of the impression made on me by the Divine Comedy, which, when it came to the Paradiso, I could only think a divine comedy indeed, in which I had no wish to take part either as comedian or spectator. The vexed question is always how, in this frightful world, beyond which there is only Nothingness, to infer a God who makes the vast sufferings of existence only a seeming, but who makes the longed-for salvation from them something real and actual and consciously to be enjoyed. That may do very well for the Philistine, particularly for the English Philistine. He gets on excellently with his God by making a contract with him, according to the terms of which he, in return for fulfilling so many points in the agreement, will finally enjoy eternal felicity above, in compensation for various insufficiencies in this world. Only what have we to do with such vulgar notions?
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 283