My very dear Sir and friend,
How much it pleased me to know that you had remembered my birthday. Please accept my most heartfelt thanks! It also touched me that you should have felt it necessary to speak apologetically about your attempts in Basle to enlist support for Bayreuth. In Basle? - it is extraordinary! My most valued friend, I really think that we are united by more important interests than these - strange-seeming - interests of artistic experimentation!
I gather from your brief allusions that our old friend Nietzsche has been holding himself aloof from you as well. There is no doubt that very striking changes have taken place in him: but anyone who observed him and his psychic spasms years ago could almost be justified in saying that a long-dreaded and not entirely unpredictable catastrophe had now overtaken him. I have retained sufficient friendship for him not to read his book - which I glanced through as I was cutting the pages - and can only wish and hope that he will thank me for it some day.
With the request that you remember me and my wife to your own dear wife, I remain, in friendship and respect,
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. 466