Dear friend,
Please accept my thanks for sending me your recently completed work! As you can well imagine, we were deeply touched not only by your aim in writing it but also by the way you have done it. If I am to say briefly what it is that I find to criticize about it, it is less the occasional - and unavoidable - inaccuracy, or even the vagueness in your presentation and arrangement of the facts, than that you were obliged to base so much of your narrative on the accounts of other people, and then generally in their own words, and generally at excessive length, so that these passages stand out all too clearly from your own descriptions based upon personal experience and knowledge. In this way, Nohl & his associates, for example, often give themselves airs, and, more especially, attempt to be far too witty, particularly when it comes to describing me and my remarks or obiter dicta, so that I could easily be put off myself as a person; for all too frequently it is a somewhat insipid and stupid figure that I see reflected in this mirror of theirs.
I should prefer it if the English translation were made on the basis of a rather more concise original: and you might make certain corrections to the first volume in the light of the notes which I sent you. My wife, for ex., has remarked on the omission of Frau v. Muchanoff (Kalergis-Nesselrode.) -
Of course, it would be best if I could find the time and leisure to go through a copy of your book in detail, with a pencil in one hand. But it is impossible for me to do so at present. You can well imagine the difficulties from which I am having to extricate myself at present, simply in order to be able to breathe freely once more, and, indeed, there are times when I despair utterly of ever being able to do so again. Unless you have experienced what I have had to go through, it is impossible to judge the sort of people into whose midst I have been thrown! I recently told my wife as a joke that I was ashamed to be my own contemporary! - What I may yet be able to salvage from the wreck of my festival idea will probably be very little. -
I had to smile at the fact that you, too, with all the authority that is due to you, had recourse to the “finishing touches which W. is putting to the full score of Parzival”. You cannot seriously imagine that I have to compose a little every day in order to enjoy life? During the early months of last spring, in order to avert my mind forcibly from the most appalling impressions that life then had to offer - I only got as far as working out the poem itself, which had previously existed only as a draft. The poem is now finished, and if you care to visit us in August or September, you may read it for yourself. At all events, you will then be able to convince yourself that Parsifal has nothing whatsoever to do with Lohengrin, in spite of the fact that some people will insist upon seeing it as a postludial prelude to the earlier work. -
Let me conclude by assuring you that you are one of the most deserving people ever to have met me on my way through life. My wife and I regard you and your own wife as utterly devoted to us, and would ask you only to continue to behave towards us in this same spirit.
Sincere good wishes from us both.
Your obedient servant,
Richard Wagner
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 450