To Rebecca Dirichlet, Berlin
Frankfort, July 2nd, 1836.
... Such is my mood now the whole day; I can neither compose nor write letters, nor play the piano; the utmost I can do is to sketch a little,28 but I must thank you for your kind expressions about “St. Paul;” such words from you are the best and dearest that I can ever hear, and what you and Fanny say on the subject the public say also... no other exists for me. I only wish you would write to me a few times more about it, and very minutely as to my other music. The whole time that I have been here I have worked at “St. Paul,” because I wish to publish it in as complete a form as possible; and moreover, I am quite convinced that the beginning of the first, and the end of the second part, are now nearly three times as good as they were, and such was my duty; for in many points, especially as to subordinate matters in so large a work, I only succeed by degrees in realizing my thoughts and expressing them clearly; in the principal movements and melodies I can no longer indeed make any alteration, because they occur at once to my mind just as they are; but I am not sufficiently advanced to say this of every part. I have now, however, been working for rather more than two years at one oratorio; this is certainly a very long time, and I rejoice at the approach of the moment when I shall correct the proofs, and be done with it, and begin something else.
I must tell you of the real delight with which I have read here the first books of Goethe’s ‘Wahrheit und Dichtung.’ I had never taken up the book since my boyhood, because I did not like it then; but I cannot express how much it now pleases me, and how much additional pleasure I take in it, from knowing all the localities. One of its pages makes me forget all the misères in literature and art of the present day.