Dear and honoured friend,
Permit me to confer dispassionately with you on the barest essentials, and to come straight to the point.
Important though it is for me, for obvious reasons, to ensure that my departure from Vienna be as unostentatious and as honourable as possible, I am, none the less, particularly anxious that, for reasons connected with my concern for my future as an artist, I should be able to return to Vienna openly and without embarrassment, and, more especially, to appear in public there in the perhaps not too distant future.
Even today I hope that people still regard me as having gone away for only a relatively short period. This measure was aimed above all at facilitating your negotiations with my rapacious creditors; if you succeed in reaching an advantageous settlement here, there will no longer be anything to prevent me from returning to Vienna and staying in or near the city, unless, of course, I decide to give up my Penzing apartment in consequence of its having proved too expensive to maintain, and to exchange it for one which promises a more secure haven of peace for my work. If I had sufficient time at my disposal either to give due notice on my apartment, or else to rent it anew, this could be done straightforwardly and privately, without drawing undue attention to myself; more especially, from my apartment in Penzing I would not have any difficulty persuading those of my creditors to whom I still owe money to defer settlement of the same, since, on the one hand, they have already received considerable payments on account from me, and, on the other - as I have, for example, been told - they are only too well accustomed to extremely long delays on the part of certain gentlemen of the highest rank, in addition to which I have enjoyed their complete confidence in the past. My relations with these men will immediately change the moment that I move out of my apartment, and leave Penzing and Vienna for good. If only it were possible to gain more time, so that I might succeed in completely appeasing these creditors, by preparing them for such an eventuality, too! You see, it is my intention to present the affair to them as follows, or - proceeding in the proper manner - to beg you, my dear friend, to come, first of all, to the following arrangement with my landlord. You must say that experience has now shown, on the whole, that my Penzing apartment is too expensive to maintain and that in winter it involves intolerable difficulties, which is why I was already disposed in due course to give notice that I was leaving the apartment, and to leave it, moreover, by next winter. Within the last few weeks, however, it has emerged that I shall be abroad for most of this summer, and, as a result, shall not be able to enjoy the last remaining advantage which the retention of my Penzing apartment would have offered me - that of granting me a pleasant place to stay this summer. As a result, I am anxious to find a new tenant who would enter into the terms of my own tenancy at least for the necessary period of a year. And so I empower you to take whatever steps are necessary to find a suitable tenant for my apartment: however, all my furniture, as it comprises at present, will remain in the apartment until such time as it has been let, and in the unfortunate event of your not finding another tenant in time, I shall at least fulfil my obligations to the landlord and pay the necessary rent, - of this there can be no doubt. - Since, however, I have converted the apartment at great expense into a highly recommendable proposition, we may well assume that you will have no difficulty in finding a tenant for the same from the 1st of April onwards, which is the date on which I should first like it to be made available to be let. -
Once this has been done, I would then give further instructions for my furniture to be taken into temporary storage at some suitable place, in order that I may use it again at some later date, once I have decided to rent a new and convenient apartment in Vienna. -
It is in this spirit that I now intend to appeal to my other creditors, in other words, to tell them that I am not leaving Vienna, but that I am in fact thinking only of moving house.
In truth, I do not think that I am lying when I say this. All things considered, my dear friend, I have repeatedly had to atone in my life for the unfortunate consequences of two mistakes above all: over-haste in choosing an apartment, and over-haste in giving up the same. If, in the present case, I hold a single thread in my hand, linking me to the public world of artistic enterprise, it is the one which binds me to the Vienna Opera. Above all: if I really do succeed in completing the Mastersingers in the course of this year, Vienna will continue, as always, to remain the most preferred and most important place for the first performance of the same. It therefore seems very likely that I shall be staying there next winter, indeed - in the case just posited - it would even be completely unavoidable, since I could not agree to the first performance of this work taking place there without me. Certain consequences would inevitably be bound up with this, chief of which is that I would remain in continuing contact with Vienna as my place of residence.
How difficult and expensive it was on previous occasions to make do with regard to my lodgings in Vienna is something I have discovered only too well. It therefore seemed sensible in every respect not to give up my Viennese connections entirely. My furniture would therefore have to be put back: perhaps only a few unnecessary items could be sold at once. For I should let you know, my dear friend, in the course of this summer how things were faring with me, and whether, given the above presuppositions, I intended to return to Vienna for the winter. In that case I would entreat you to use your experience - as you have already offered to do for me - to seek out and rent a suitable and more modest apartment for me in Vienna itself, which I would then furnish with some of the necessary furniture pending my later return. Past experience would enable me to strike the right balance in furnishing this apartment, a task which would be made simpler by the fact that it would not be for the purposes of leisure that I was settling down there, but simply for the purposes of domestic accommodation at times when I was engaged in business.
And so let us be agreed that I am not leaving Vienna, but intending only to move house! -
I hope that you are fully in favour of this idea; if so, I would ask you to submit it to our friend Dr Standhartner for his advice and approval, after which you should both jointly inform the general public of its purport, if need be by means of a notice in the newspapers.
It is in this spirit, too, that I shall now appeal to my creditors, and, if necessary, take the liberty of referring them to you for confirmation of what I have said. - (As already mentioned, I have not yet deemed this necessary.)
This agreement would be undermined only if my creditors, and, more especially, the usurers among them, alarmed at my departure, were to have lost their heads and seized my furniture etc. I suppose I shall discover soon enough whether this is so. This was of course not one of our presuppositions: and I hope that, in the course of your negotiations so far, you have succeeded in impressing upon people the need to behave in a decent manner towards me!
In order to be perfectly clear as to the question of which of my debts are founded upon bills of exchange, it is necessary for me to give you the following detailed report.
Through Emanuel Kellner, Josephstadt, Schmiedegasse No 4, I negotiated a loan of 7400 fl., for which I received 5000 fl. in cash, i.e. five thousand gulden in Austrian currency. This was in December 1863, for the end of February and the end of April together. On the 1st of March I gave Herr Kellner 100 fl. in order to obtain the necessary extension.
Further:
Through Joseph Glauber, Teinfaltstrasse, No 17, I negotiated 3 loans of 1500 fl. each, totalling 4500 fl. in all. This was at the end of January 1864, and of the 3 bills of exchange (all of which fall due on the 30th of April this year) the first - I happen to know - is now in the hands of a certain Herr Schwarz, 13 Opernring. For the first two of these bills I received 2000 fl. in cash, in other words 1000 fl. for each sum of 1500 fl. borrowed; for the third, however, I received only 900 fl. since, although Glauber repeatedly promised to bring me the missing 100 fl., he has not carried out his promise in spite of repeated reminders. (It must be said that Glauber is the one creditor who least deserves our consideration: unfortunately, the three bills which he provided are endorsed by Herr Tausig. You know this already.)
In order to redeem the bills which I made out to my upholsterer Ferdinand Schweikart, Mariahilfer Hauptstrasse 64/11, and of which you have similarly already been notified, I must ask my friends to be kind enough to take whatever steps are necessary.
- Unfortunately, I have only just informed our friend Dr Standhartner that I had forgotten to tell you of a debt of honour, in the form of a bill of exchange for 200 fl., which I owe Franz Goltsch, commissionaire at the Hotel Kaiserin Elisabeth. I promised the man that I would redeem his bill of exchange at the end of this month: he did indeed obtain the sum of 200 fl. for me and, because my generosity is sufficiently well-known to him, he expects a gift which cannot really work out at less than 20 fl. -
This brings me to the end of this dreadful confession of my sins! You know, my dearest friend, in what an utterly hopeless position I find myself just now, and how it is not possible for me at present to make even the least contribution towards a material ordering of my financial affairs. And so I must place all my hopes for a tolerable degree of prosperity in future upon your succeeding, by dint of your vigorous efforts, in effecting the most advantageous possible arrangement with the above-named creditors in such a way that my reputation does not suffer so much in the process that it becomes impossible for me to return to Vienna in the future. But, ultimately, this aim can be attainable only if other, well-to-do friends of my art, having been apprised of my position and asked for their help, could persuade themselves to hand over to you the necessary pecuniary resources.
If this is not successful, or if it is insufficiently successful for you to achieve the essential aim of all these efforts, I would most certainly have to regard myself as having taken my leave of the world when I last left Vienna, and, in doing so, I should presumably be prevented from embarking, with any prospect of success, upon the last remaining expedient that might yet lead to my future artistic prosperity.
Whatever happens, I shall never for a moment be in any doubt as to the debt of gratitude that I owe you, my dearest friend, for your exceptional kindness! You may always be assured of this fact, and I would ask you, therefore, on this assumption, to remain at least tolerably well-disposed towards
Your
grateful & obedient servant
Richard Wagner
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 294