belongs to Alberich: no one else!! Away with it! (…) I hate all appearances withlethal fury: I’ll have no truck with hope, since it is a form of self-lying.” [627W-{10/7/54}Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 319]
[628W-{12/16?/54} Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 323]
[P. 323] {SCHOP} “For the sake of young Siegfried, the fairest of my life’s dreams, I expect that I must still complete the Nibelung pieces: the Valkyrie has exhausted me too much for me to begrudge myself this relaxation; I have now reached the second half of the last act. But it will be 1856 before I have completed the whole thing, and 1858, the tenth year of my hegira, before I can perform it, -- if fate so decrees. But since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love, I intend to erect a further monument to this most beautiful of dreams, a monument in which this love will be properly sated from beginning to end: I have planned in my head a Tristan and Isolde, the simplest, but most full-blooded musical conception; with the ‘black flag’ which flutters at the end, I shall then cover myself over, in order – to die.“ [628W-{12/16?/54}Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 323]
[629W-{3/55}Letter to Franz Liszt: CWL, p. 73]
[P. 73] {FEUER} {SCHOP} “Ah, we are all holy martyrs; perhaps I shall one day be a real one, but in that case all will be over for me with art – that beautiful delusion, the last and the most sublime, to hide from us the misery of the world.” [629W-{3/55}Letter to Franz Liszt: CWL, p. 73]
[630W-{5/12/55}Letter to Jacob Sulzer: SLRW, p. 338-339]
[P. 338] {FEUER} {SCHOP} “… all I could probably … become, were I really able to break free from my art, would be a Schopenhauerian saint! Well, I need not worry on that score, since as long as there is a glimmer of life in me, these artist’s illusions of mine will almost certainly not release their hold on me; they are really a kind of decoy with which my instinct for self-preservation repeatedly lures my better judgment into its service. I can really imagine nothing pure and clear that is not immediately contaminated by such images and which, once my insight has passed, repeatedly makes me an artistic visionary once again. The stupidest thing of all is that I can see all this quite clearly and know that I am always the victim of a certain delusion, but, instead of perceiving this delusion as such and protecting myself against it, I allow this, too, to become an image which provokes me with the outline and colour I need to portray it, at which point I then turn round to face life once more in all its most sensual and captivating impressions and connections, in order that the dance may start up all over again.
{FEUER} {SCHOP} And so this artistic nature of mine is very much a daemon which repeatedly blinds me to the clearest insights and draws me into a maelstrom of confusion, passion and folly, and, finally, restores me to a world which I had really overcome long ago and whose nullity and emptiness is perhaps more obvious to me than it is to many others … . And so there are often moments in my life when I feel so completely annihilated by this insight that I suddenly begin to ask myself whether I can go on living. You will perhaps laugh when I tell you that such moments occur above all when I see an animal being tormented: I cannot begin to describe what I then feel and how, as if by magic, I am suddenly permitted an insight into the essence of life itself in all its undivided coherency, an insight which I no longer see as mawkish sentimentality but which I
