My best remembrances to the Princess.

Your

Richard.

Zurich, September 29th, 1854.

168.

Dear Franz,

I begin to find out more and more that you are in reality a great philosopher, while I appear to myself a hare-brained fellow.  Apart from slowly progressing with my music, I have of late occupied myself exclusively with a man who has come like a gift from heaven, although only a literary one, into my solitude.  This is Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest philosopher since Kant, whose thoughts, as he himself expresses it, he has thought out to the end.  The German professors ignored him very prudently for forty years; but recently, to the disgrace of Germany, he has been discovered by an English critic.  All the Hegels, etc., are charlatans by the side of him.  His chief idea, the final negation of the desire of life, is terribly serious, but it shows the only salvation possible.  To me of course that thought was not new, and it can indeed be conceived by no one in whom it did not pre-exist, but this philosopher was the first to place it clearly before me.  If I think of the storm of my heart, the terrible tenacity with which, against my desire, it used to cling to the hope of life, and if even now I feel this hurricane within me, I have at least found a quietus which in wakeful nights helps me to sleep.  This is the genuine, ardent longing for death, for absolute unconsciousness, total non-existence; freedom from all dreams is our only final salvation.

In this I have discovered a curious coincidence with your thoughts; and although you express them differently, being religious, I know that you mean exactly the same thing.  How profound you are!  In your article about the “Dutchman” you have struck me with the force of lightning.  While I read Schopenhauer I was with you, only you did not know it.  In this manner I ripen more and more.  I only play with art to pass the time.  In what manner I try to amuse myself you will see from the enclosed sheet.

For the sake of that most beautiful of my life-dreams “Young Siegfried,” I shall have to finish the “Nibelungen” pieces after all; the “Valkyrie” has taken so much out of me that I must indulge in this pleasure; I have got as far as the second half of the last act.  The whole will not be finished till 1856; and in 1858, the tenth year of my Hegira, the performance may take place, if at all.  As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of all my dreams, in which, from beginning to end, that love shall be thoroughly satiated.  I have in my head “Tristan and Isolde,” the simplest but most full-blooded musical conception; with the “black flag” which floats at the end of it I shall cover myself to die.

When you have had enough of “Rhinegold,” send it to Chorusmaster Fischer at Dresden, instructing him in my name to give it to the copyist Wolfel, so that he may finish the copy which he has begun.  Your cheering words about the “Rhinegold” were splendid, and it has really turned out well.  I hope there will be enough counterpoint in it to please Raff.  My anxiety as to this troubles me very much.