Dear Richter,
A few lines to ask a favour of you which I forgot to mention yesterday.
Please call on Herr Dr Egger (co-director of the Vienna Beethoven Committee), and kindly inform him in my name that, if he and many another honest man had wished to persuade me to conduct a special part of the projected Beethoven Festival, they would have done well not to have sent me the list of board members. It is impossible for me even to reply to an invitation which also includes Herr Hanslick and Herr Schelle. If the good people of Vienna are incapable of understanding this, I shall simply have to let the matter rest there. Let them then revile me all over again. I am used to it, so that it will make no difference to me. If I were ever to take it upon myself to celebrate Beethoven, I believe I could achieve something, after my own fashion, without having to make claims upon the peculiar powers of the Viennese press, still less to enlist its help. Please do this for me, and accept my very best wishes.
Yours,
Rich. Wagner.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 394