It is seldom, probably, that any man has held concepts so widely divergent from his intuitions, has been such a stranger to himself, as I, who am forced to admit that I have only arrived at last at an understanding of my own works of art - that is to say, formed an intellectual conception of them, elucidated them to the satisfaction of my own reason - by the aid of another, who has furnished me with concepts perfectly correlative with my intuitions. The period during which I have created in response to these inner intuitions began with The Flying Dutchman; Tannhauser and Lohengrin followed, and if there is any one imaginative principle underlying them, it is surely the high tragedy of renunciation, the deliberate, reasoned, ultimately necessary negation of the will, in which alone is salvation. It is this underlying quality which gives inspiration to my poetry and my music; without it their actual power to stir the emotions would be non-existent.
Now, nothing is more striking than the fact that all the ideas I had formed by way of speculation and in an attempt to attain an understanding of life, cut clean across these basic intuitions. While, as an artist, my intuitions had such compelling certainty that all my creations were moulded thereby, as a philosopher, I was attempting to construct an entirely contrary explanation of the universe, an explanation which, though most stoutly upheld, was always being dismissed cavalierly by my instinctive objective artistic perceptions, much to my own astonishment. My most startling experience of this kind came to me, as it must have done, in regard to The Nibelungs. I shaped the poem at a time when I had built myself a conceptual universe upon the Hellenic-optimistic model, which I believed entirely possible of realisation if mankind would only will it, and in it I attempted ingeniously to bridge for myself the problem as to why, in that case, they do not actually will it. I recollect now having evolved the character of my Siegfried to this very end, with the will to present a life without sorrow; but I counted on expressing myself still more plainly through the presentation of the whole Nibelung myth, with its exposure of a first wrong, from which springs a whole world of evil, which therefore perishes, and so teaches us all a lesson on how we should recognise the evil, tear it out by the roots and establish a righteous world in its stead. And all the time I scarcely noticed that in the execution, indeed at bottom even in the planning of my design, I was unconsciously following a quite different and far deeper perception and, instead of a phase of world evolution, had discerned the nature of the universe itself in all its conceivable phases and had recognised its nothingness; whence it naturally happened that, since I was faithful not to my concepts but to my intuitions, something emerged quite different from what I had actually proposed. And yet I recollect that I at last succeeded in making my intention tell, by force as it were, in one single passage, in the significant last words of Brynhilde in which she tells the bystanders to look away from the evil thing, property, to the only satisfying thing, love, without, unfortunately, quite coming to an understanding with myself as to this love which, after all, as we see, appears in the course of the myth as an utterly devastating force. In this one passage, then, I was blinded by the interposition of my conscious intentions. Well, curiously enough, this passage continually tormented me and it required the great revolution in my rational concepts, ultimately effected through Schopenhauer, to disclose to me the cause of my trouble and to give my poem a fitting keystone - a sincere recognition of the true underlying nature of things - without, on that account, rendering my work in the least propagandist.
I am an artist and nothing but an artist - that is my blessing and my curse; if it were not so, I should gladly be a saint and know my life settled in the simplest way for me; and so I run hither and thither, poor fool, to find peace, that complex peace of an undisturbed sufficiently comfortable life, in order to do nothing but work, be free to be an artist. This is such a difficult thing to obtain that I often have a hearty laugh at myself and my everlasting hunt for peace.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 310