You poor, poor Tschekel!
How could I have suspected you so falsely! You saw that I could scarcely believe it myself, and could only assume that for the moment you were downright insane. I was even almost sure that I had been wrong. For my wife sent me the text again (from Dresden) and that passage was marked with pencil: so I believed it had been omitted at the performance. Now—without having yet asked my wife about it—I account for it by supposing that she marked the passage because she especially liked it. In this case it might have been a queer quid pro quo and the mark might have meant the very opposite. My suspicion was strengthened because a cut would have been so easily possible here. But enough of this strange mistake, and accept my best thanks for your prompt explanation. If you want to do me a favor, I implore you: insist upon the restoration of the omitted passages at the end of the first finale and in the third act duet (omitted by Ney). This wouldn't add much to the length. But in the finale-allegro the whole effect of the increasingly rising musical structure gets lost and such a thing is mortifying to me; the cut, however, in the duet is so silly and pitiful that I make this declaration: If I were pardoned and came to a Lohengrin performance, I certainly couldn't bring myself to go to the theater and take such a box on the ear as that cut. Tell this from me to Frau Ney-Bürde, and if she wants to answer for this later it shall be her affair. In spite of her various disturbing features, I had become reconciled to the idea of her for my parts, considering the great rarity of good singers and her extraordinary voice—and saw in her a good future prospect for my operas. I counted on her good will and the influence which her respect for so serious a task might exert on her. But now the real test has come. If she can't bring herself to restore that disturbing and damaging cut I will recognize that she is not to be taken seriously, and she won't exist any longer for me.
When I also insist on the restoration of the cut in the finale, don't take this, dear one, as stubbornness. Think of it, rather, in this way: for the sake of the receipts I have to hand over my operas to any theater, as when, having the worst misgivings about the expected performance, I became quite callous about Berlin, which is to bring me in the most; but if people for whose judgment I care ask me where they should hear my operas, I strongly advise them against Berlin and let it go at that. On the other hand, my only concern is to have a theater once more of which I can say: There you are! There you get the best notion of my work. This I always do now with Dresden as long as Rienzi or Tannhäuser is concerned. Ought I to say now as to Lohengrin: Go rather to Vienna? Merely because I know that there such nonsensical and silly cuts wouldn't occur, while for the rest I know that the whole performance would get an otherwise unattainable splendor and nobility by your glorious performance? At the same time, if those shameful spots were not corrected I should forever hate the Dresden production.
It seems silly that the present Dresden chorus can't manage the cut passage in the first finale. The devil, let them try again; in other places they managed well enough.
This now brings me to your conductor question. Even last fall, Conductor Schlick in Venice told me he knew that the management was looking around for a good conductor, but where to get him? Recently I was told Rietz is under consideration. I am grieved that the selection is always made without any sense and reason and that the people who understand the job are never considered. Rietz I know positively to be a very good leader, who is capable of conducting and keeping an orchestra together, but he is entirely unable to penetrate a dramatic work which demands something far more than a good orchestra leader, the only qualification which kept him in Leipzig. What would you get from such a man, stubbornly hostile to my operas, musically an orthodox "Mendelssohnian"? Evidently not what the Dresden opera needs. If asked for a recommendation, I would first of all confess that any recommendation here would be very difficult, since generally recognized clever and talented conductors are not just now functioning in any important German theater. I would then recommend with the best conscience a young man whose enormous abilities for the task are known to me and whose eligibility I would back with my full authority. It is Herr Karl Klindworth, established in London at present as a music teacher. He is from Hanover, and as early as his sixteenth year was employed at a little theater as musical director. Having acquired the most perfect routine in that difficult assignment (especially difficult in a small theater) after five years, he heard Liszt playing the piano and was so carried away that he decided to give up the ungratifying . . .
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner: The Burrell Collection, ed. John N. Burk (Macmillan, 1950), No. 206