As anyone passionately excited by a living experience would have done, I pressed on, as fast as I could, to the conclusion of the Schopenhauerian system: but though its aesthetic portion had satisfied me completely, and particularly had astonished me with its notable understanding of music, I was nevertheless shocked—as any in my state of mind would have been—by the moral turn at the end of it all. For there, the extinction of the Will to Life, absolute renunciation, was put forward as our only real and final redemption from the bonds (now for the first time keenly felt) of our individual limitation in understanding and dealing with the world. For such a one as I, who had expected to cull from philosophy a capital justification for political and social agitation in the name of the so-called “free individual,” there was here, obviously, nothing to gain: the only offering was a requirement to turn from this road entirely and put down the impulse to a personal career. To me, at first, this had nothing at all to say. Not so readily, I thought, would I allow myself to be moved to renounce the so-called “cheerful” Greek viewpoint, from which I had composed my paper on “The Artwork of the Future”. Actually, it was Herwegh, with a weighty thought, first moved me to reconsider my emotion. “All tragedy,” he suggested, “is contingent on this insight into the nullity of the sphere of appearance; and every great poet—indeed, every great human being—must inwardly have reconciled himself intuitively to this truth.” I looked back to my Nibelungen poem and there, to my amazement, found that what now was giving me such difficulty as a theory had long been familiar to my own poetic imagination.


— Richard Wagner, on Tristan und Isolde