From a letter by Richard Wagner to Franz Liszt, December 1854, on the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose writings he had discovered that autumn:
"Apart from my - slow - progress with my music I have now devoted my time exclusively to a man, who - if only through his writings - has been a gift of heaven to me in my loneliness. This is Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest philosopher since Kant, whose ideas - as he puts it - he has completed by thinking them through to their logical conclusion. The German academic world has - prudently - ignored him for forty years: but recently he was discovered - to Germany’s shame - by an English critic. What charlatans are all the Hegels etc compared with him! His central thought, the final denial of the will to live, is of frightful seriousness, but the only salvation. Of course this idea was not new to me and no one can think it at all in whom it did not already exist. But it was this philosopher who first showed it to me with such clarity. If I think back to the storms of my heart and the terrible cramp with which it clutched - against my will - at the hope of living, indeed when these storms even now still rise in tempestuous strength - now at last I have found a palliative, which alone helps me to sleep in sleepless nights; it is the deep and innermost yearning for death: total unconsciousness, absolute non-being, the extinction of all dreams - unique and final salvation!
It is marvellous that I am now constantly coming across your own ideas: though you express them differently, because you are religious, I still know you mean just the same thing. How deep you are! In your essay on the Dutchman you often struck me with lightning force. When I read Schopenhauer I was mostly with you: only you did not notice it. And so I am getting more and more mature: it is only to pass the time that I still play with art. How I try to entertain myself you can see from the enclosed page.
For the love of the most beautiful dream of my life, the young Siegfried, I suppose I shall have to get on and finish the Nibelung pieces: die Walküre has claimed too much of me to deny myself this exhilaration; I have got as far as the second half of the last act. But it will be 1856 before I have finished the whole thing - and in 1858, the tenth year of my hegira, I can perform it - if I must. But since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love I will erect a monument to this most beautiful of all dreams, in which for once this love shall well and truly gorge itself from beginning to end: I have sketched a Tristan und Isolde in my head, the simplest but most full-blooded musical conception; with the ‘black pennant’ which flutters at the end I shall then cover myself up - to die."
Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, Leipzig 1910, vol. 2, pp. 42-3
Here are the final words of Isolde's Verklärung (Transfiguration) - as Wagner referred to it (he never called it a Liebestod). Compare Wagner's above letter to Isolde's concluding words:
In dem wogenden Schwall,
in dem tönenden Schall,
in des Welt-Atems
wehendem All---
ertrinken,
versinken ---
unbewußt ---
höchste Lust!
In the surging swell
in the sounding echo
in the World-Breath's
universal stream
- to be drowned
- to be engulfed
oblivious -
Oh supreme delight!
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