You are right, my dear friend, “we” have been rude. It is not my particular fault. Let me explain a little. I did not reply to your letter [of March 8] from Prague because I had only time while there to send a hasty scribble to Carl Ritter, who was then staying with you and had written at the same time. One does not stand on ceremony with one’s contemporaries, you see. Then, in Paris, Blandine told us with a triumphant air that she had heard from you, but when we asked whether there was any mention of us, she replied: “No, he did not say a word about you.” As regards the negotiations with the Théâtre Lyrique, Cosima and I have tried repeatedly to get something done, but in vain. Ollivier (whom I have discovered to be a detestable fellow, bursting with vanity and selfish ambition) had either a speech or a piece of legal work to prepare, or he was on a bad footing with Carvalho because he had trodden on the numerous corns of his vanity; or he had some other excuse for proceeding to the order of the day. I tried to find out something from Carvalho off my own bat, but missed him every time or was turned away.
As for the Leipzig affair, I give you my word of honour that I only lent the score and parts of the Tristan Prelude after Liszt’s repeated and most emphatic assurance that you had given Brendel permission to play it at his request. Ask Liszt; make him show you the correspondence that passed between us at Weimar, Leipzig, and Berlin some day. To give you an idea of the confusion which reigned at the Leipzig festival I may tell you that my name was put down on two programs to play five pieces without my having been asked or even informed of the printed notices. They disposed of me as if I had been a lifeless machine. “You are to play that and that,” and that’s all about it. I had to spend all my spare time at Leipzig working up these pieces. I wish you would ask Dräseke, who was an eyewitness, to tell you what my health was like at the time. Tortured with toothache, I had to be present at that banquet of bourgeois and philistine music-makers and had to content myself with making faces at the vulgarity of their toasts. First B. produced a tactless and cowardly one to “Johann, the merry state-coachman, protector of the arts and sciences,” which led me to toss my glass full of wine under the table to the horror of these geese “of the future.” Then Hans von Bronsart, that ultra-royalist, rose in fury and was hurrying towards the platform to show the reverse of the medal when he was stopped on his way by a gesture and almost tragically imploring look from the Master, who forbade him to speak. We both calmed down gradually, for the course of the supper and its oratorical seasoning were such that we began to look upon it as an honour that your name was not mentioned. Where the dead and the still-born are being fêted, there is no room for immortal names.
Do not imagine that I suppose you care in the least about these pettinesses. I am far from doing you such injustice even in thought, but I was anxious not to leave the secondary points in your letter unanswered. That you “have had enough of us all, your friends,” is of course quite in order. But remember that, first of all, you have no friends. How should friendship fall to a man like you, who have no equal, stand outside the normal lines, and belong to another world, different from this vulgar, trivial one? Friends one looks at; you one looks up to. I, for instance, who am not exactly one of the most disreputable of my craft, I should in all seriousness be quite willing to become your boot-black and errand-boy, but the claim to be called friend by you is one which I should not have the impudence to make. There is just one who might have been much to you, and you to him, and it would have been on a different basis from the Weimar one. But it was not to be, and you are both the poorer. It was the middlemen who prevented it, for, as everyone knows, they make contact impossible for those whom they are supposed to bring together, by placing themselves between. Then there are all the daylight ghosts who so persistently pester my honoured father-in-law. (Unfortunately he encourages them.) It is one of my greatest worries.
Thank you for your sympathy. In spite of all my misery, I feel myself to be enough of a weed to be sure of surviving. The conductor’s job at Karlsruhe would not be so bad. Better than giving lessons, I assure you. As the first Tristan rehearsal is to take place as early as October, I shall have to keep my nose to the grindstone. Two thirds of the second act are arranged. I am at page 250. In the allegro movement, to which I have now come, I propose to take the liberties which you have authorized. I have in fact amused myself by making it more difficult than you suggest. The pianoforte edition is to me the playable score in nuce. Those musicians who cannot afford the expensive full score have a right to demand a pianoforte edition with text. Let Härtel have the arrangements “without words” turned out by his men in the usual way. You know I refused it as the last profanation. Your Tristan stands in the same relation to Lohengrin as Beethoven’s last quartets to his first. The analogy seemed to me very striking. You now have to reckon with a later Beethoven public, and the sublime night-music (in A flat major) cannot be popularized into a “Star of Eve.” Compared with Klindworth’s edition, though, my arrangement will always be pure Pleyel or Diabelli. This to console Breitkopf.
Well, good-bye. Let Dräseke write if you cannot. I am going to Karlsruhe for Tristan with Cosima, who is now nursing her brother Daniel—a serious lung case—at our house. Good-bye for today.
PS. In the Shepherd’s song, I suppose I need not puzzle out any accompaniment (in small notes)? I have taken the liberty of eliminating several more misprints in Act II from the corrected score.
Source: Letters of Hans von Bülow to Richard Wagner, Cosima Wagner, His Daughter Daniela, Luise von Bülow, Karl Klindworth, Carl Bechstein, ed. Richard Count Du Moulin Eckart, trans. Hannah Waller, ed. Scott Goddard (Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), No. 283