in the treasure of the Niebelungen; and
Siegfried was to represent "a socialist redeemer come down to earth to
abolish the reign of Capital." As the rough draft developed, Wagner went
up the stream of his hero's life. He dreamed of his childhood, of his
conquest of the treasure, of the awakening of Bruennhilde; and in 1851 he
wrote the poem of _Der Junge Siegfried_. Siegfried and Bruennhilde
represent the humanity of the future, the new era that should be
realised when the earth was set free from the yoke of gold. Then Wagner
went farther back still, to the sources of the legend itself, and Wotan
appeared, the symbol of our time, a man such as you or I--in contrast to
Siegfried, man as he ought to be, and one day will be. On this subject
Wagner says, in a letter to Roeckel: "Look well at Wotan; he is the
unmistakable likeness of ourselves, and the sum of the present-day
spirit, while Siegfried is the man we wait and wish for--the future man
whom we cannot create, but who will create himself by our
annihilation--the most perfect man I can imagine." Finally Wagner
conceived the Twilight of the Gods, the fall of the Valhalla--our
present system of society--and the birth of a regenerated humanity.
Wagner wrote to Uhlig in 1851 that the complete work was to be played
after the great Revolution.

The opera public would probably be very astonished to learn that in
_Siegfried_ they applaud a revolutionary work, expressly directed by
Wagner against this detested Capital, whose downfall would have been so
dear to him. And he never doubted that he was expressing grief in all
these pages of shining joy.

Wagner went to Zurich after a stay in Paris, where he felt "so much
distrust for the artistic world and horror for the restraint that he was
forced to put upon himself" that he was seized with a nervous malady
which nearly killed him. He returned to work at _Der Junge Siegfried_,
and he says it brought him great joy.

"But I am unhappy in not being able to apply myself to anything but
music. I know I am feeding on an illusion, and that reality is the
only thing worth having. My health is not good, and my nerves are
in a state of increasing weakness. My life, lived entirely in the
imagination and without sufficient action, tires me so, that I can
only work with frequent breaks and long intervals of rest;
otherwise I pay the penalty with long and painful suffering.... I
am very lonely. I oft