[...] I may mention in passing that I was recently vouchsafed the most curious experience of breathing new life into a number of youthful compositions of mine which for a time had been lost without trace. It is really my wife whom I must thank for this service, since it was she who showed the most unheard-of zeal and the keenest perspicacity in following every lead in her search for what had been lost. As a result a trunk was recently rediscovered in Dresden containing a small number of bigger instrumental works, but consisting only of their orchestral parts. Well, I now have a young musician here with me, whom I am training as my future conductor; he is having to produce a full score from the rediscovered parts, and in this way each passing week brings with it the surprise of rediscovering another new movement of a great symphony which I wrote and performed in Leipzig over forty years ago. Notwithstanding my intolerance towards these early works and my refusal to have them more widely known, I am bound to concede that this symphony is entirely worthy of me. It has had a remarkable fate. In 1835, in other words 43 years ago, I wanted Mendelssohn (who was then in Leipzig) to look through it for me; in order not to rush him but to leave him ample time, I asked him to keep my manuscript. I often saw him after that, but he never said a word to me about the symphony. He died, and I - moved on. - I told my wife about this at Triebschen. After that she would not rest. Our young friend Nietzsche got to know Mendelssohn’s son: enquiries were made through him: not a trace. When the son died in his turn, further enquiries were made of Mendelssohn’s old heirs: in vain, the manuscript was and - as it appears - is missing. Has it been destroyed? - And then, finally, copies of the orchestral parts were discovered in an old trunk, and - behold! - my youthful work stands before me once again, a source of genuine delight. I may perhaps revise it a little by and by, and believe I shall then be able to offer the world compelling evidence of my youthful talent, from a time when I never composed anything that I was not inspired to write, - a fact which Brahms - my fellow knight - understands so well. -
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 465