My dearest Friend Heckel,
You really are the first to send me a sympathetic sign of life from Germany. My thanks for it.
Herr Feustel has written me nothing, down to the present, but horrors about the growing deficit, which I alone am expected to remedy. Good! I have composed and despatched my circular; I have inquired in Berlin, and of the King of B., — without as yet receiving any answer. Under such miserable circumstances, your idea of a 4th performance to cover the deficit is certainly the most decorous; only, people will not be able to wait so long for the payment of certain bills. Now, as I have had nothing but misery with the winding-up of my Festspiele, and I should need a very strong inducement to repeat and continue them, before I could overcome my boundless repugnance against any further concern therewith, — I really am only waiting for a crowning abomination to decide me to break up everything, and that in the most literal sense. I shall then turn absolutely silent, and hand everything there to the creditors of my undertaking without a word, exactly as with a legal bankruptcy.
Indeed you are the only one — the only one of all, to shew a noble care about myself and the affair!
My health, under such conditions, is none of the best: my inner trouble, and the flutter of uncertainty, are too great. On the other hand I am rejoiced by the thriving of my wife and children in this beautiful locality. Yet we shall soon have to quit Sorrento (which — facing North — is strictly but a summer resort): probably we shall spend from the middle of this month to the 2nd quarter of December in Rome, then about 14 days in Florence; in any case we must soon be turning home, as my very hard-put household purse (in spite of American March) will not sustain us here much longer.
Till the 10th inst. I am here: letters will be sent after me.
So! the very heartiest greeting from Wagners to Heckels.
Your
very devoted
Rich. Wagner.
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner to Emil Heckel, with a Brief History of the Bayreuth Festivals, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Grant Richards, 1899), No. 72