My very dear Herr Kapellmeister,
Your enquiry does you great honour and deserves an equally honest response.
The appeal which came to you from Munich was based upon the assumption that they might eventually find a conductor sufficiently unscrupulous as to perform my work without my personal co-operation. They have not yet succeeded in doing so, since all the most capable conductors who are friendly towards me have refused their help.
If they are now similarly mistaken in their assumption with regard to yourself, their search will no doubt have to continue. My experiences with the Munich Court Theatre during the course of the last two years, and their attitude towards me, have made all contact with them quite impossible, so that there can of course be no question, on my part, of involving myself in a performance of any of my works for which all those arrangements have already been made which, solely and uniquely, should have been ordered by me if my co-operation were to have made any sense.
In spite of this somewhat unfortunate state of affairs, my exalted patron, the King of Bavaria, insists upon satisfying a desire of his which I should normally find most flattering, but which consists in the wish to see the “Valkyrie”, too, performed as soon as possible. Here, too, I must respect this token of his gracious attitude towards my works, and can never for a moment forget that, without the immeasurable kindnesses shown me by the grace of his royal favour, I should perhaps already have sunk into utter oblivion, and would be taken no further notice of by anyone, least of all by the German people and their theatre directors. As a result, I have also felt obliged to state that, should His Majesty persist in this desire of his, I should certainly raise no objection to a performance of my work, although - since this performance, to my great regret, is to take place in public, I know that I am exposing one of my most difficult and problematical works to the greatest possible vexations in terms of an unsympathetic assessment and totally unclear effect. To avoid these vexations by the only means open to me - my personal co-operation on every aspect of the presentation and execution of the work - has been rendered impossible, as I have lost no opportunity of stating in the appropriate quarter: but instead of obviating this difficulty by removing its causes, the theatre intendancy has fallen back upon an expedient which has involved you, too, in its invitation to Munich.
It grieves me, therefore, to have to explain to you what I have already explained to them in Munich: I have nothing against your conducting my work, provided that any agreement in this regard is made solely between you and the Munich intendancy, and that in no conceivable way are any demands made upon me. -
I am happy to have this opportunity to tell you of my delight at having heard only praise of your performances of my “Mastersingers” in Karlsruhe, and, more especially, that comparisons between the Dresden performance and yours were very much in your favour. How salutary it is for me to be able to welcome a man of real talent as conductor of a German opera-house is something which I probably do not need to affirm. -
Assuring you of my very great respect, I remain
Your most devoted servant
Richard Wagner
P.S. Some considerable time ago Herr Kayser made enquiries of me, in the name of the directors of the Grand Ducal Court Theatre, concerning my fee for the performing rights for my opera Rienzi. I informed him of my demand, and would have thought that I might have expected to have been honoured with the courtesy of a reply: could I now ask you to be so kind as to mediate herein?
R.W.
I am re-opening this letter to say that, in the event of your seeing in it a way of clarifying the affair in question, I would gladly authorize you to publish the first three pages of today’s communication. -
R.W.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 393