My dear good Wife!
Writing these few lines and thinking of you will relieve my mind, and at the same time will give you briefly the news about myself.
As I wrote you the day before yesterday—I came here yesterday in order to wander a bit through this delightful country on foot: Liszt, who was starting for Frankfort for two days, accompanied me by railway to this point. By coincidence also, the Grand Duchess had taken the same train to Eisenach in order to visit the Duchess of Orléans. At the station she learned that I was here and at once sent word to me that I might visit her in Eisenach tonight. I excused myself because of my traveling clothes, but it was of no avail; I had to promise to come anyway. When I came from the Wartburg (which you must see with me whatever happens), I walked to the castle in my jacket and gray trousers and my cap (which I bought here), through the rows of all the nobility to the Grand Duchess, who received me with extraordinary friendliness and started a long conversation with me: I had to promise to see more of her in Weimar. I am made much of here by everybody, but I have only one desire—to have my dear wife here to witness all this and to recover from her recent troubles by an agreeable visit. Won't you listen to my entreaties and come to Weimar on Sunday to hear Tannhäuser with me? I have already attended an orchestra rehearsal of it which was so wonderfully striking that I was often moved to tears—tears which did me good.
Here, my dear wife, I am certainly safe. Besides, I seem to be looked upon rather more leniently in Dresden than at first. Surely, if the reactionaries would bring vengeance on all who participated in any way in the upheaval, they would have to prosecute half the state of Saxony!
Tomorrow I plan to return to Weimar again, and I shall use the first quiet hours to write at length to Devrient and Heine: I shall offer my help to make the breach with Dresden no longer irreconcilable and perhaps I'll succeed in getting an agreement soon for a half-year's leave for London and Paris. Everything depends on whether and how much I have been denounced in Dresden: if I have been heavily compromised, a matter about which, naturally, I cannot judge, any agreement would certainly be difficult, and I should have to carry out my plans for Paris and London without any consideration of Dresden; but this very plan may reconcile my adversaries, who have to consider that the more of fame and honor I acquire abroad, the more disadvantageous it would be for Dresden to exclude me entirely. So I am hoping for the best.
About the King of Saxony and the whole situation there only one opinion prevails abroad, an opinion which you will surely not hear just now in Dresden and Chemnitz. God knows how everything may turn out! It's certainly not over yet!
Oh, my Minna, if I only could know that you are not sick! You will now have much to attend to, and I feel ashamed at having left everything on your shoulders alone. But your cleverness and care will bring everything into the best of order. Well, dear wife, I now recognize that you are my good angel! If it had not been for you, and if the thought of you had not restrained me, who knows into what I might not have plunged myself!
Now remain faithful to me! In any case come to Weimar; I certainly will not leave before I have seen you for a few days.
A thousand kisses and greetings from your
R. W.
Heine has my text of Lohengrin; get it from him so that I may have it here!
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner: The Burrell Collection, ed. John N. Burk (Macmillan, 1950), No. 68