[671W-{8/24/59}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 460]
[P. 460] “Judged by the standards of a wise man, I must straightway seem criminal, simply because I know so much and so many things, and, more especially, know that wisdom is so desirable and so wholly admirable. But this, in turn, gives me my characteristic ability to leap over abysses which the wisest of men are not even aware of. That is why I am a poet, and – what’s worse – a musician. Just consider my music, with its delicate, oh so delicate, mysteriously flowing humours penetrating the most subtle pores of feeling to reach the very marrow of life, where it overwhelms everything that looks like sagacity and the self-interested powers of self-preservation, sweeping away all that belongs to the delusive madness of personality and leaving only that wondrously sublime sigh with which we confess to our sense of powerlessness -- : how shall I be a wise man when it is only in such a state of raving madness that I am totally at home?” [671W-{8/24/59}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 460]
[672W-{1/60} Explanatory Programme: Prelude to ‘Tristan und Isolde’: PW Vol.VIII, p. 387]
[P. 387] {FEUER} {SCHOP} “Henceforth no end to the yearning, longing, bliss and misery of love: world, power, fame, splendour, honour, knighthood, loyalty and friendship, all scattered like a baseless dream; one thing alone left living: desire, desire, unquenchable, longing forever rebearing itself, -- a feverish craving: one sole redemption – death, surcease of being, the sleep that knows no waking!” [672W-{1/60} Explanatory Programme: Prelude to ‘Tristan und Isolde’: PW Vol.VIII, p. 387]
[673W-{3/3/60}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 486]
[P. 486] {FEUER} “Everything is alien to me, and I often gaze around me, yearning for a glimpse of the land of nirvana. But nirvana quickly turns back into Tristan; you know the Buddhist theory of the origin of the world. A breath clouds the clear expanse of heaven:
[Note: Wagner places here musical notation for the opening notes of the ‘Tristan Prelude’]
It swells and grows denser, and finally the whole world stands before me again in all of its impenetrable solidity.” [673W-{3/3/60}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 486]
[674W-{4/10/60}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 489]
[P. 489] “One becomes all-powerful only by playing with the world.” [674W-{4/10/60}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 489]
