Paris, March 3, 60. I mean to make to-day for once a feast-day : I will write to you, Lady-friend ! Advisedly and with kind consideration I have often dropped the pen which I repeatedly had taken up of late to write you. My need is great, and I wish to earn its fulfilment ; so I'll see what friendly scraps of news I can scrape together for you. First I'll describe what now stands on my chimney-piece — in place of &pendule. 'Tis a singular object. On a mount of red velvet is spread a silver shield, the length of its rim filled up with emblems from my poems, from Rienzi to Tristan u. Isolde. Upon this shield, within a silver wreath — one bough of laurel, the other oak — lies a massive silver sheet of music, half rolled up : on this roll leading themes from my operas are carved in musical notation. A beautiful silver pen rests in the twigs of the wreath, above the sheet of music ; the boughs are bound together by a golden fillet, on which stands written : " Des rechten Mannes Herz muss uberstromen in der Sonnenhohe grosser Manner," — and then : " Dem hohen Meister gewidmet in aufrichtiger Verehrung von Richard Weiland."* This Richard Weiland is a simple citizen of Dresden, men " : " Dedicated to the exalted Master, in sincere veneration, by Richard Weiland." Glasenapp informs us that the sender, son of the historical painter Wilhelm Weiland, was born in 1829, and had devoted himself to literature ; for a short time he appeared on the acting stage, but, in view of his youth, that can scarcely have been until after Wagner himself had left Dresden. - Tr. whom I never knew there, but who paid me a visit once at Zurich — in the Asyl — and furnished me that droll criticism of the Prague representation of Tannhäuser with his simple statement that the overture, which merely lasted 12 minutes under myself at Dresden, was 20 minutes long. — I found his gift, with a most unassuming note, awaiting me one evening when I came home fagged-out by coaching my choruses. — So I now have the baton * and this piece of plate. Here my concerts f have gained me some very firstrate devotees. GASPfiRINl, a kind doctor of great skill and education, but seemingly about to give up his profession for literary and poetic work ; a man of fine, refined exterior and great warmth of heart, only perhaps a shade wanting in energy, —belonged to me even before my arrival, and is now the most zealous and persistent champion of my cause. He has got the " Courier du Dimanche " to open to him for that— In VlLLOT I have won an admirable brain, a clear and delicate mind of unusual culture, emancipated from all prejudice. This man (who married off a son the other day) is Conservateur des Musees du Louvre, and as such has entire custody of the [national] art-treasures. He has written a history of the Louvre collections, a giant work that cost him 15 years of unremitting toil. — Now imagine it : this man had possessed all my scores long ere I made his acquaintance, has studied them closely, and now is quite happy at my being able to get Hartels to supply him with a Tristan partitur already.^ He has quite surprised me by the keenness of his judgment, especially anent the capabilities of his own nation ; to which he belongs completely as regards expression, whereas he far transcends it in his spirit : his is a very handsome and distinguished head. I have not yet taken advantage of his offer of a minute inspection of the treasures of the Louvre, with himself for cicerone, and probably shall be unable to for a long, long time. Among several others, I may also mention the novelist CHAMPFLEURY, whose brochure, outcome of a first impression, I have already sent you : he has a very pensive, sad, appealing eye. His friend the poet BAUDELAIRE has written me a couple of wonderful letters, but does not wish to be presented to me till he has finished some verses with which he proposes to honour me. — I have told you of FRANCKMarie : * he has written a good deal about me, but personally remains a stranger yet. Then there's a young painter, GUSTAVE Dor£, who already has a great name here : he has made a drawing, intended for the Illustration, representing me as conductor of an orchestra of spirits in an Alpine landscape. Further, there are numerous musicians and composers, who have declared themselves for me enthusiastically ; among them GOUNOD, a suave, good, purely but not deeply gifted man ; Louis Lacombe, Leon Kreutzer, Stephan Heller. Of importance as a really profound musician is Sensale.f who will play me my scores by and by. A Mr. PERRIN, of note as painter, past Director of the Opera comique, and presumably future ditto of the Grand, is most devoted to me, and has written very beautifully about me in the Revue Europdenne. BERLIOZ has fallen victim to envy ; my efforts to keep friends with him have been frustrated through the brilliant reception, to him intolerable, of my music. As a fact, he finds himself seriously crossed by my appearance in Paris on the eve of a production of his Trojans ; moreover, his unlucky star has given him a wicked wife, who lets herself be bribed to influence her very weak and ailing husband. His behaviour to me has been a constant hovering between friendly inclination and repulsion of an object of envy. Very late,* yet so as not to be obliged to record the impressions of a repeated hearing of my music, did he publish his report, which you will probably have read. I could but deem right to reply to his ambiguous, nay, rancorous allusions to the " Music of the Future " ; an answer you will find in the Journal des D6bats of February 22.f Rossini has behaved much better. A jest about my unmelodiousness had been fathered upon him, and greedily colported even into German papers. Well, he expressly dictated a disclaimer, declaring that he knew nothing of mine but the Tannhäuser march, which had given him the greatest pleasure, and moreover, that, from all he knew of me, he held me in high esteem. Such seriousness in the old Epicurean surprised me. — Finally I have yet another conquest to announce, namely of a Marshal, Magnan, who attended all 3 of my concerts, and displayed the greatest interest. As I unfortunately am bound to want such a man well-instructed about me, for sake of certain circles, I paid him a call, and was really astonished at his expressions : he had had to hit out left and right, and couldn't conceive how people could hear anything else in my music than just such music as Gluck and Beethoven had written, only with the special stamp of genius "of a Wagner." — I can't unearth a single copy of my concert-programmes for you to-day ; but you shall have one yet. Then you will see that they did not turn out too intime. I laid your reflections to heart, and even the words upon Tristan [cf. p. 198] contained nothing but a note about the subject. — Now I'll tell you a little more about the concerts. The string-instruments were capital, 32 violins, 12 violas, 12 violoncellos, 8 double-basses: an uncommonly sonorous mass, the hearing of which would have caused you great joy, only the rehearsals were still too inadequate, and I couldn't quite extort the proper piano. The wind-instruments were merely partly good ; none of them had energy. To specify : the oboe remained pastoral all the time, never rising to passion ; the horns were miserable, and cost me many a sigh (their wretched blowers excused their repeated false entries by the disconcerting effect of my signal) ; trombones and trumpets had no brilliance. Everything was atoned in the end, however, by the really great enthusiasm for me that possessed the whole orchestra from first to last desk, and proclaimed itself so openly throughout the performances themselves that Berlioz is said to have been stupefied. Thus the three nights turned out positive festivals, and as far as demonstrations of enthusiasm go, the Zurich festivals were a mere shadow compared with them ; the audience was riveted from first to last. I had made a new close for the overture of the " flying Dutchman," which pleases me much, and also made an impression on my hearers [cf. Life iv, 301]. But childlike shouts of joy broke out directly after the natty melody in the Tannhäuser-march, and as often as that melody returned, the same explosion was repeated ; a frank child-heartedness which put me in quite a good humour, for never yet had I heard such immediate 2IO WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK outbursts of delight. The Pilgrims' chorus was sung very tamely and ineffectively the first time ; afterwards it went better. The Tannhäuser - overture, played with great virtuosity, always earned me many a call. The prelude to Tristan wasn't played to my liking before the third concert : on that evening it much rejoiced me. The audience, also, seemed thoroughly stirred by it ; for, when an opponent ventured to hiss — after the applause — such a storm broke forth, and so intense, protracted, and continually renewed, that poor I hardly knew what to do on my platform, and had to motion people to leave off, for God's sake, I was satisfied ; but that sent the temperature up again, and once more the storm broke loose. In short, I never passed through such a thing before. — All the pieces from Lohengrin produced an immense effect from the beginning ; orchestra and audience almost carried me on their hands after each. I can express it no otherwise — they were festival-nights. — And now the child will be asking in wonder, why I am not content with such beautiful experiences, and look so dolefully ahead ? — Eh, thereby hangs a tale,* but all I can say, is : Festival-keeping is easy — and — I want no feasts ; such nights remain something beyond me, they are intoxicants, nothing else, and leave the after-effects of all inebriation ; — if I only were differently built, tho', it might pass. As a matter of fact, I have made a long stride ; so I might take a good rest now, wait comfortably for what is coming next, and what folk assure me is certain to come — Fame, Honour, and all else ? A precious fool I should be ! Think of it : I was distracted all the evening of my first concert because a certain Receveur GdneVal had not arrived yet from Marseilles ; and what about this individual ? — He was the wealthy man who, Gasptrini had assured me, was keenly interested in my proposal to get my operas performed in France, and might easily be induced to give me his energetic support in it. I had nothing in eye but the possibility of a first production of the Tristan in May, in Paris with German singers ; that was the solitary goal toward which I was steering, on which I staked everything, and in particular the frantic strain of these 3 concerts. My wealthy man was to run over from Marseilles ; the success of my music was to make him declare himself prepared to give the needful guarantee for the said operatic adventure. Finally the man arrives, for the third concert : he has a big dinner on that night, at Mires' ; still — he does come to the concert, for an hour, and — proves a magnificent Frenchman, immensely delighted, but afterwards sceptical of a German operatic enterprise, and so on. — So I had again been a regular child ! Really, I always know it beforehand ; and yet one hopes — and dares — because a goal stands out before one, a goal one deems so requisite. And all the use of me, all the sense remaining in my life, is solely to look at that goal and overlook everything that lies between myself and it. Only in sight of that goal, indeed, can I still live ; how can I live, if I'm to turn my eye from the goal and plunge it in the gulf that parts me from it? Maybe others should do that for me, and hold me in the air ; but who has a right to ask that of anyone ? Does not each of us live with a goal in his eye, only that it just is not the goal of the eccentric? So it happens, child, that once again the stupid master must look deep and long into the gulf alone :— ah, how he feels in his heart then ! No scene in Dante's Hell has ghastlier abysses ! — Indication enough. — And the goal (?), for all that, remains the only thing that keeps life in me !— But how to reach it ?-^ Yes, Lady-friend, 'tis the truth: once more all's night around me ! Had I no more goals, it were easily otherwise ; but now I have simply to climb out with untold toil and trouble from the gulf in which I lately had to plunge again with wellnigh deliberate blindness. Not yet can I so much as see the plateau whence to fix my gaze upon the goal again. — When I last perceived the ineluctable necessity of staking all and everything at present on a first production of my Tristan, I also told myself : With this goal in eye, there can now be no abasement more for thee ; all and aught thou doest to attain to means and power, can hold nothing to shame thee, and whoso might not comprehend thee if he saw thee treading unaccustomed paths, thou might'st reply to him : " What know'st thou of my goal ? " — For, he alone can comprehend me, who first has comprehended that. — Well, every day brings forth new plans ; now this, now that contingence looms before me. I'm so indissolubly banned to this work, that I would gladly bring my life as sacrifice — in sober earnest — and swear to will to live not one day longer, when once I have produced my work. So perhaps it's not inconsequent, that I should now be possessed with the notion — instead of all the labours and humiliations I should have to undergo to arrive at the required means through " Parisian successes " — just of taking up the simplest cross and going to Dresden, getting myself tried, passed sentence on, and — pardoned, for all I care ; to be able, unmolested then, to seek on the spot for the best German theatre, produce my Tristan there, and dissolve the spell which so holds me now that nothing else seems worth an ounce of trouble. Indeed it appears wellnigh the most rational course ; methinks it resembles an unpardonable love of self, to refuse any manner of torture or shame that might lead to my work's redemption ; for Paris letters 2J3 what am /, without my work?— And add to that this other: I don't believe in my operas in French; all I do toward that end is against the inner voice which I can deaden but with levity or violence. I believe neither in a French Tannhäuser, nor in a French Lohengrin ; to say nothing of a French Tristan. My every step towards it, too, remains unblest: a demon — my daemon? — is at work against me in it all. Only at command of a despot could all the personal obstacles be beaten back, that rear themselves against my advent to the Paris Opera-house ; but I've no true zeal to compass that. Before all, what concern of mine are my old works, grown all but indifferent to me? Repeatedly I catch myself in the most utter lack of interest in them. And then the French translations ! I'm bound to think them clean impossible ; the few verses translated for my concert cost unspeakable pains, and were insufferable ; neither is a single whole act from my operas translated as yet, in spite of endless labours, whilst what thereof exists is odious to me. Moreover, the tongue itself is one of the principal reasons why everything here remains strange to me ; the torment of a conversation in French fatigues me hugely, and I often break off in the midst of an argument, like a castaway who tells himself : " Indeed it isn't possible, and everything's in vain ! " Then I feel too deplorably homeless, and ask myself: Where dost thou, then, belong? A question I can answer with no country's name, no town's, no hamlet's ; all, all are foreign to me, and wistfully I often look towards the land Nirvana. Nirvana in its turn, however, soon changes into Tristan ; you know the Buddhist theory of the world's creation : A breath perturbs the heaven's translucence : — §J ^j p '^ - rtf*^ — f - ; it swells, condenses, and at last the whole wide world stands forth, in prisoning solidity. 'Tis my old, old fate, so long as I've such unredeemed spirits still about_ me ! — I have something homelike still about me, tho', which I'm soon to be deprived of — Bulow. The poor young man is slaving himself to the bone here, and I get little enough of him ; he cannot visit me often, yet it's a comfort even to know that he's here. Dear Heaven, it does me so much good, to be able to converse naturally ; and that I now can do with him alone. He is and remains most attached to me, and it often is touching to get behind the secret pains he constantly is taking for me ; whereon he turns quite mournful if I tell him that it all can not avail. But I want to give him one. delight before he goes, and tell him : You have sent him greetings through me. — I have now to submit to a little business being done with me, to try and clear a little of the fearful havoc the expenses of my concerts have left behind them. One [Belloni ?] proposes that I should give the identical concert thrice at Brussels, under conditions which ensure me a small profit. I suppose I shall have to ; so be prepared to hear from me next from thence. Of London, too, one speaks to me. It's sad enough ; but I cannot die as yet, you know. — And now it will be well, Lady-friend, if I draw to a close : I clearly see there's no more friendly tidings to squeeze out, and already I've much overstepped the line. However, my heart is somewhat lighter since at least I've been able to write you again : thanks for affording me that ! And many kind messages to Otto and the children ; let me hear how you all are doing. With faithful love Your R. W.
Richard Wagner
Source: Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, translated by Ellis, No. 101