My august and dearly beloved King,
That I have been placed in so novel and so auspicious a situation I owe to your Majesty’s gracious favour, a favour which I find as totally unexpected as it is undeserved. The resolves which were bound to ripen within me under so benign an influence I now propose to lay before my gracious protector, and to address to Your Majesty a most humble entreaty arising therefrom.
I am now in the fifty-second year of my life, with my powers at their highest pitch: if I may be permitted to believe that the consummation of all my existing achievements is even now in prospect, then it follows that I should not delay in addressing these powers to that selfsame end.
I am resolved to lay aside all other work for the present, however advantageous it might have been to me in view of its greater practicability, and to devote myself, exclusively and without delay, to completing the composition of my great Nibelung work.
In doing so I believe that I shall also be acting in accord with the exalted wishes of my gracious protector, whose thoughts are inspired by the loftiest ideals, and, on this supposition, I would entreat Your Majesty most graciously to commission the completion of my tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung”, together with the systematical preparation and eventual performance of this work in Munich. May it please Your Majesty to assign to me suitable accommodation in Munich for this purpose, together with the means to live freely and independently during the period necessary to complete this task, without my being obliged to pursue any other trade.
In consequence of this explicit commission - a commission to which, in accord with your own more lofty insight, Your Majesty may deign to attribute the same great and far-reaching national significance that I myself expressed when I published the poem in question - Your Majesty would, in my most humble opinion, proclaim to the whole of the world, in clear and unmistakable terms, a unique and noble design, a work whose performance will be of detriment to no one but which will bring honour to our fatherland; my own position, which is so much envied, will then become understandable and need no longer be concealed in all its beauty, and Your Majesty will have no difficulty in granting me the grace and favour you desire me to have by bestowing upon me whatever privileges may yet be necessary if I am to obtain the total peace and quiet that my work demands.
In the most fervent trust I therefore commend my entreaty to Your Majesty’s grace and favour, through which alone I exist as an artist in the eyes of the world, and, assuring Your Majesty of my deepest respect and most inviolable devotion, I remain
Your Majesty’s
most loyal subject and servant
Richard Wagner
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 311