[587W-{5/31/52}Letter to Theodor Uhlig: SLRW, p. 260]
[P. 260] {FEUER} “I am again more than ever moved by the comprehensivegrandeur and beauty of my subject [the ‘Ring’]: my entire philosophy of life has found its most perfect expression here.” [587W-{5/31/52}Letter to Theodor Uhlig: SLRW, p. 260]
[588W-{8/52} On the Performing of Tannhaeuser: PW Vol. III, p. 199-200]
[P. 199] {FEUER} ”The whole past now lies behind him like a dim and distantdream; scarce can he call it back to mind: one thing alone he knows of, a tender, gracious woman, a sweet maid who loves him; and one thing alone lies bare to him within this love, one thing alone in its rejoinder, -- the burning, all-consuming fire of Life. – With this fire, this fervour, he tasted once the love of Venus, and instinctively must he fulfil what he had freely pledged her at his parting: ‘gainst all the world, henceforth, her doughty knight to be.’ This World tarries not in challenging him to the combat. In it – where the Strong brims Full the sacrifice to it by the Weak – man finds his only passport to survival in an endless accommodation of his instinctive feelings to the all-ruling mould of use and wont (Sitte). Tannhaeuser, who is capable of nothing but the most direct expression of his frankest, most instinctive feelings, must find himself in crying contrast with this world; and so strongly must this be driven home upon his Feeling, that for sake of sheer existence, he has to battle with his opposite in a struggle for life or death. It is this one necessity that absorbs his soul, when matters come to open [P. 200] combat in the ‘Singers’-tourney; to content it he forgets his whole surrounding, and casts discretion to the winds: and yet his heart is simply fighting for his love to Elisabeth, when at last he flaunts his colours openly as Venus’ knight. Here stands he on the summit of his life-glad ardour, and naught can dash him from the pinnacle of transport whereon he plants his solitary standard ‘gainst the whole wide world, -- nothing but the one experience whose utter newness, whose variance with all his past, now suddenly usurps the field of his emotions: the woman who offers up herself for love of him. – Forth from that excess of bliss on which he fed in Venus’ arms, he had yearned for – Sorrow: this profoundly human yearning was to lead him to the woman who suffers with him, whilst Venus had but joyed. (…) It is here that his love for Elisabeth proclaimsthe vastness of its difference from that for Venus … .” [588W-{8/52} On the Performing of Tannhaeuser: PW Vol. III, p. 199-200]
[589W-{8/52} On the Performing of Tannhaeuser: PW Vol. III, p. 201]
[P. 201] “Thus does he love Elisabeth; and this love it is that she returns. What the whole moral World could not, that could she when, defying all the world, she clothed her lover in her prayer, and in hallowed knowledge of the puissance of her death she dying set the culprit free.” [589W-{8/52} On the Performing of Tannhaeuser: PW Vol. III, p. 201]
