My Friend,
I send you herewith an acknowledgment that I received the money all right. Since the rupture of my Petersburg negotiations I no longer can withhold from you the information that it was yourself, without knowing it, who helped me out of the terrible fix into which I was brought by my three Parisian concerts. Just when it had become necessary to provide at once the costs of those concerts, which eventually ran to over 11,000 francs, — just when other hopes which had been inspired in me, of immediate reimbursement for those concerts, were totally destroyed, and everything was strained to the uttermost, I had an answer from the music-publishers who had approached me about the Rheingold; quite unexpectedly they complied with my conditions, and sent me the demanded fee forthwith in a bill of exchange on Paris.
At like time I was written to from Petersburg, that the Director of the Imperial theatre would be coming to Paris soon, to try to secure me for Petersburg next winter on most advantageous terms. You were a long way off, and my case was desperate: the concerts, once announced, had to be gone on with. — I employed the Rheingold fee, in the presumption that I could repay you at once from the profits of the promised Petersburg engagement: then, too, should you be told of what had happened.
Now this prospect, also, has recently been closed to me. So I can delay no longer in acquainting you. Every possibility of recouping you by other means, I must disown as illusory. Nothing remains for me, but to give you a receipt for the amount stipulated between us for the last piece of the Nibelungen, and ask you to consider the sum for the Rheingold as thus paid back to you. I certainly shall execute the last piece yet; if that were not reserved for me, I know not what could hold me still to life, when I daily long for death with all my heart.
It is very possible that you will have reproaches to make me; impossible, however, that you will not save them for a later period, when they no longer might serve to increase the greatest bitterness a man can feel toward life. As to the precise arrangements for publication of the Rheingold, another time.
Farewell, and arrive safely back at the green hill!
Your
R. W.
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to Wesendonck et al., trans. and indexed by William Ashton Ellis (Grant Richards, 1899), No. 26