Dear Friend,
That you, as well, can have the heart to give myself and plight no further thought, and merely speak to me about that affair in the same tone as my other friends, has much distressed me. No one knows what to suggest; nay, even my appeal to the Patrons is only to be sent out "with prudence," because the times are too bad, and yet the performances are to be announced again as soon as possible! It is incredible! You even ask about the Festival-medal, which I naturally countermanded as soon as the ever-increasing deficit was reported to me. What on earth do people expect of me? No: I now inform you positively, that I shall devote next summer to nothing but the possible recruiting of my health, — for which, on account of the wearing and increasing pains in my abdomen, I think of taking a very protracted course of waters at Marienbad and so on. If I find myself restored to health, we will see what can be brought to pass in the year after next. If the deficit is not covered in the interim, and that without any further labour on my side, I propose to hand the whole theatre over to some entrepreneur or other, perhaps even to the Munich Court-theatre, and never bother my head about it again.
Here, dear friend, my strength gives out. My undertaking hitherto was a question to the German public: "Do you will it?" Now I assume that it doesn't, and accordingly have come to an end. I beg you henceforward to look at the thing in sole light of these statements, and, if you deem proper, to give my other friends an equally summary enlightenment about myself, whom they don't seem able to understand.
In one of my perpetually sleepless nights I have tried to gain a little ease by telling a true and sympathetic friend, as which I always have regarded you, the exact and final truth about myself.
Remain good to me!
Your
ever devoted
Richard 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. 73