Enough for today.
I am always and wholly yours,
RICHARD WAGNER
ZURICH, September 11th, 1850
44.
DEAREST FRIEND,
The second performance of your masterpiece has answered my expectations, and the third and fourth will bring home to every one the opinion I expressed as soon as we began rehearsing "Lohengrin," namely, that this work will confer on a public making itself worthy of understanding and enjoying it more honour than that public could confer upon the work by any amount of applause.
"Perish all theatrical mud!" I exclaimed when we tried for the first time the first scenes of "Lohengrin." "Perish all critical mud and the routine of artists and the public!" I have added a hundred times during the last six weeks. At last, and very much at last, I have the satisfaction to be able to assure you very positively that your work will be better executed and better heard and understood from performance to performance. This last point is, in my opinion, the most important of all, for it is not only the singers and the orchestras that must be brought up to the mark to serve as instruments in the dramatic revolution, which you so eloquently describe in your letter to Zigesar, but also, and before all, the public, which must be elevated to a level where it becomes capable of associating itself by sympathy and intelligent comprehension with conceptions of a higher order than that of the lazy amusements with which it feeds its imagination and sensibility at our theatres every day. This must be done, if need be, by violence, for, as the Gospel tells us, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and only those who use violence will take it.
I fully understand the motive which has made you speak with diplomatic reserve of the audiences of "Lohengrin" in your letter to Zigesar, and I approve of it. At the same time, it is certain that, in order to realize completely the drama which you conceive, and of which you give us such magnificent examples in "Tannhauser" and "Lohengrin," it is absolutely necessary to make a breach in the old routine of criticism, the long ears and short sight of "Philistia," as well as the stupid arrogance of that self-sufficient fraction of the public which believes itself the destined judge of works of art by dint of birthright.
The enemy to whom, as you, my great art-hero, rightly put it, one should not capitulate—that enemy is not only in the throats of the singers, but also very essentially in the lazy and at the same time tyrannical habits of the hearers. On these as well as on the others one must make an impression if necessary by a good beating. This you understand better than I could tell you.