[...] My trust in the boundless forbearance and grace which my exalted benefactor has always shown me has never been disappointed, and it was in that selfsame spirit that I recently described to him, openly and candidly, the reason why it was impossible for me to work together in common with the musico-dramatic forces that obtain in your Royal Court Theatre, more especially with the aim of bringing about the first performance of my “Parsifal”. In doing so I was of course too remote from the particular conditions and considerations which have persuaded my generous protector to leave things as they are in the running of that artistic institution - too remote for me to be in a position to judge whether it was an unrealizable demand which I was making in expressing the wish that actual changes be introduced in its administration. In the light of the observations which I have subsequently made in this regard, I believe I should now be acting in a manner both seemly and in grateful accord with my exalted lord’s abundant grace, if I declare of my own volition that, in presenting the first performance of my work in Bayreuth, I renounce the co-operation of the Royal Court Theatre as run by its present General Intendant.
A number of considerations and - I may say so quite openly - questions of conscience have persuaded me of late to show serious restraint with regard to this final work of mine. Although conceived in ideal terms, I have had to surrender all of my works to a kind of audience and theatrical practice which I recognize to be deeply immoral, so that I must ask myself in all seriousness whether I should not at least rescue this latest and most sacred of my works from a similar fate, namely that of a common operatic career. I was finally no longer able to deny that the purity of content and subject-matter of my “Parsifal” was the decisive factor here. How, indeed, might it be possible or permissible for a drama in which the most sublime mysteries of the Christian faith are openly presented on stage to be performed in theatres such as ours, side by side with an operatic repertory and before an audience such as ours? I should certainly not blame our Church authorities if they were to raise an entirely legitimate protest against representations of the most sacred mysteries upon the selfsame boards on which, yesterday and tomorrow, frivolity sprawls in luxuriant ease before an audience attracted solely by such frivolity. I was entirely right in feeling that I should entitle “Parsifal a Sacred Stage Festival”. And so I must now try to consecrate a stage for it, and this can only be my solitary festival theatre in Bayreuth. There, and there alone, may “Parsifal” be presented now and always: never shall “Parsifal” be offered in any other theatre as an amusement for its audience: and it is to ensure that this happens that I am uniquely concerned at present and persuaded to consider how and by what means I may safeguard the destiny of this work.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 479