Gentlemen and friends,
It will always remain an impossibility for me to give adequate expression to my gratitude and recognition of the services you have rendered me in the undertaking that I have instituted. This is the first point that saddens me, now that I have to respond to today’s communication from you!
The second is that I am bound to recognize how completely impossible it is for me to discharge my deeply-felt debt by fulfilling your wish to see the performances take place next year.
I thought I had already expressed myself quite clearly enough on this point when we last met, and therefore will only repeat that, the more seriously I feel obliged to contemplate the matter closely, the more I am able to estimate the damage that has been caused by the delay in reaching agreement on a financial guarantee. As a result I am now out of touch with all those people whom I had had in mind for the festival, and must start all over again in securing their services.
For example, it was impossible for me until now to say to any of the singers: “don’t agree to any guest performances this summer, so that you can be available for me”, and I shall regard myself as fortunate if I can persuade even a handful of them to make themselves available for a few days this year, in addition to their commitments elsewhere.
Believe me, it is quite impossible to present this enormous four-part work, each part of which would require three months’ preparation in the largest theatres, in a year from now, which is all the time that is left to me.
This is the first point. The second is your suggestion and wish that I myself should raise the necessary funds by means of my own personal activity. Even assuming that I might succeed in raising significant funds by constantly travelling around and giving concerts, it grieves me to have to tell you that I could not endure the strain involved, which is why I have had to provide myself with a conductor to assume these duties for me for the festival performances themselves, just as I had to do in Munich, on an earlier occasion, in order to save my energies. I feel more than either of you, my highly esteemed friends, that the ultimate guarantee for the success of our great undertaking lies in my retaining my physical and mental powers, because there is no one, apart from myself, who can judge the extent of the task that I have set myself here. What is more, my experiments last year in this regard have shown me quite clearly that not one of those attempts at personal intervention produced results commensurate with the effort involved. On the contrary, it became clear to me in the light of those experiences that no amount of preaching in advance of the event can arouse people’s interest, but only the fact that so extraordinary an achievement is about to take place - even if that interest be tinged with curiosity - for it is this alone which will finally ensure us the necessary funds. Once it is established that the performances really are feasible, this interest can only be increased by delaying people’s curiosity, a device that clever people often use to intensify interest; the rehearsals (with scenery etc.) that will be held in the summer of 1875 will intensify that interest to the point where people begin to grow impatient - which is all to the good, and certainly to our own advantage.
On this point I am clear.
But what remains totally unclear to me is how to persuade myself that it will be possible to invite not only my company but 1500 visitors, including the most fastidious of guests, to come to Bayreuth in the present state of what the town can offer by way of accommodation. This, my highly esteemed friends, is so serious a point that I really must ask you to give me some explanation which might serve to reassure me, for I do not believe it will be possible for you to convince me that the funds which have so far been committed here are of a kind to enable 1000 patrons, most of whom are of aristocratic background, together with 500 free seats, to be accommodated in our hotels and private houses so that their visit to Bayreuth does not turn out to be a disagreeable experience which would make it impossible to repeat the festival in some future year.
I therefore consider it my duty to beg my highly esteemed friends to arrange a meeting as soon as possible to discuss this very important issue; and to judge from all that I imagine to be true with regard to solving this problem, you will find, I am sure, that it is certainly not too soon to start thinking seriously about the matter, if we intend to receive our festival visitors in the summer of 1876 in a manner that befits them, so that they will conceive of no obvious aversion to returning in 1877.
I pray that you may receive this response in a friendly and considerate spirit, and as testimony to one who is deeply serious but at the same time oppressed by cares, for the sake of the belief which I would entreat you most sincerely to impute to my great sense of gratitude towards you.
With the truest respect, I am
Yours,
Richard Wagner
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 423