In addition to your very kindly notice of the Leipzig
“Lohengrin,” I also received that of the “Deutsche Allgemeine”

Zeitung, and discover in it the scornful punishment inflicted upon me for the crime I committed against my being and my inmost conscience when, two years ago, I became unfaithful to my rightful determination and consented to the performance of my operas.  Alas! how pure and consistent with myself was I when I thought only of you and Weimar, ignored all other theatres, and entirely relinquished the hope of any further success.

Well, that is over now.  I have abandoned my purpose, my pride has vanished, and I am reduced to humbly bending my neck under the yoke of Jews and Philistines.

But the infamous part is that by betraying the noblest thing in my possession I have not even secured the prize which was to be the equivalent.  I remain, after all, the beggar I was before.

Dearest Franz, none of my latter years has passed without bringing me at least once to the verge of the resolution to put an end to my life.  Everything seems so waste, so lost!  Dearest friend, art with me, after all, is a pure stop-gap, nothing else, a stop-gap in the literal sense of the word.  I have to stop the gap by its means in order to live at all.  It is therefore with genuine despair that I always resume art; if I am to do this, if I am to dive into the waves of artistic fancy in order to find contentment in a world of imagination, my fancy should at least be buoyed up, my imagination supported.  I cannot live like a dog; I cannot sleep on straw and drink bad whisky.  I must be coaxed in one way or another if my mind is to accomplish the terribly difficult task of creating a non-existing world.  Well, when I resumed the plan of the “Nibelungen” and its actual execution, many things had to co-operate in order to produce in me the necessary, luxurious art-mood.  I had to adopt a better style of life than before; the success of “Tannhauser,” which I had surrendered solely in this hope, was to assist me.  I made my domestic arrangements on a new scale; I wasted (good Lord, wasted!) money on one or the other requirement of luxury.  Your visit in the summer, your example, everything, tempted me to a forcibly cheerful deception, or rather desire of deception, as to my circumstances.  My income seemed to me an infallible thing.  But after my return from Paris my situation again became precarious; the expected orders for my operas, and especially for “Lohengrin,” did not come in; and as the year approaches its close I realise that I shall want much, very much, money in order to live in my nest a little longer.  I begin to feel anxious.  I write to you about the sale of my rights to the Hartels; that comes to nothing.  I write to Berlin to my theatrical agent there.  He gives me hopes of a good purchaser, whom I refer to the first performance of “Lohengrin” at Leipzig.  Well, this has taken place, and now my agent writes that after such a success he has found it impossible to induce the purchaser to conclude the bargain, willing as he had previously been.