I feel stranger and stranger as I look out upon the world. While still living in the body, to be thus isolated in empty space, as it were, produces, after a time, a unique frame of mind, a mingling of disdain and longing. Through letters and so forth, I see you all as an abandoned sort of show and I hear not a sound from it; I am like one deaf all the time. The sense of dreaming grows on me more and more; only sometimes it seems to me as if all you were dreaming a mad, tumultuous, confused dream and I were the one soul awake and able to laugh at you. I am curious to see how long this will go on and what will be the final upshot. Very often I hardly know whether I am alive and it is possible that I shall be pulling my own nose next to make sure. My plan of work has now reached a critical stage, quite unexpected, perhaps by you. The desire to continue and to finish my Nibelungs is, to-day, nil; no one offers me the necessary cash inducements! Still, it is better I should keep all this to myself! As to Liszt, my only feeling about him at present is anxiety over the decline of his health, and anger, rage and hate against everything which tends to drag him down to his ruin. Or am I to remain indifferent, when anyone can see with half an eye that Liszt is on the way to a very early dissolution, unless he withdraws absolutely from every kind of excitement and undergoes a thorough and lengthy cure? I have confided my painful anxiety, my urgent admonitions to the unhappy Princess and, finally, to Liszt himself, since when not a word from Weimar. The devil take you all with your swine-music-festivals and musical-horse-races; you let yourselves be pelted with flowers in one quarter and with filth in another. What is the use of it all, when there is not the least possibility of getting good performances? No goodness, but much dirt!
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 337