[...] I assume you will have heard by now that the General Administration of the Dresden Court Theatre recently accepted for performance there a grand opera in 5 acts, written by myself & entitled “Rienzi”. In the letter which accompanied the submission at the end of last year, I spoke openly & positively of the reasons which made it so eminently desirable for this particular opera to receive its first performance in Dresden. As an artist I consider the most important of these reasons to be the fact that the opera’s success lies principally in the best possible casting of the 2 main roles, (& in no other theatre in the world do I know artists whom I would be more justified in expecting to fulfil the boldest wishes which I entertain for the success of the opera than Mad. Schr. Dev. & you yourself - my very dear Sir.
[...] Although I should of course be sensible of the fact that what I have placed before you is not entirely unworthy, I am nevertheless certain that what most concerns the performing artist is quite often the uniqueness of his own particular talent & his individual temperament, which must be taken into account just as much as the general truths of art itself. The figure of Rienzi, as I imagined him & attempted to depict him, should be a hero in the full sense of the word, - a visionary dreamer who has appeared like some beacon of light among a depraved & degenerate nation whom he sees it as his calling to enlighten & raise up. It is an historical fact that Rienzi was a young man of about 28 at the time he carried out this great undertaking; this - together with my particular views on the multifarious character of the tenor voice has persuaded me to write the part for a tenor, although in doing so I have stepped outside the circle of received opinion which insists that the tenor voice is appropriate solely to the character of a lover.
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 41