[...] Your letter - how shall I put it? - your letter has worked miracles, freeing me from many disquieting worries, while, at the same time, causing me renewed unrest, - for, once having read it, I was unable to work for a number of days. - I intended answering it at once, - but - I was still missing the last-act finale of my opera; - two days ago - I completed it - and with it the whole opera; - it was just midday - 12 o’clock, and bells were ringing in all the church towers as I wrote finis at the foot of the very last page; - what pleasure it gave me to do so! - Now, my dearest Rosalie, I have completed the composition of my opera, and have only the final act to score! My somewhat pedantic manner of writing out the full score immediately as neatly & clearly as possible is what has held me up most of all in scoring the work; - yet I believe that, if I work hard, it will take me about 3 weeks to complete this last remaining task, so that I shall be able to leave here in around 4 weeks’ time. - But how can I describe to you the mood I have been in throughout the whole of this period! - Each time I wrote down a note, it was my family that I thought of, - and of you, Rosalie, most of all: - it was a feeling which often encouraged me to go on, - but which often so overwhelmed me that I could not continue, but had to go outside into the open air. I often felt like that, and it seemed to me a joyful presentiment, so that, oh, how happy I was to discover that your letter bore witness to the same understanding! - May God grant that I do not disappoint you in your joyful expectations; - but I know that this will not be so, for the whole work has poured from my innermost soul - and people say that, if that is so, the work will pass into the souls of others. — [...] But tell me, you wrote amongst other things that Hans Heiling was extremely popular, and that it was continuing to play to full houses; - I must confess that in one respect this news is most welcome to me. We performed the opera here in Würzburg, and I certainly found the music very pretty, especially the individual numbers; but in no other opera by Marschner have I come across such a complete lack of any overall effect. I don’t know, but he has totally failed to exploit the best effects; - and what weak endings to each of the acts! - What an absence of melody in the choruses! In the finale to the 2nd act he treats the culmination of the whole work - “he hails from the realm of gnomes and dwarfs, and is the mountains’ spirit lord!” - so nonchalantly and gives such little weight to the climax that one assumes something quite insignificant is taking place! - In a word, not a single number can really hold the listener’s imagination! - I must confess that this might almost encourage me to entertain vain hopes about my own opera! - [...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 6