Much-worried Chamber Musician!
What a fearful lot of postage I must cost you now! Well, in return, I send you to-day a really beautiful landscape-painting instead of a letter. But as I must answer a business inquiry, it shall be done with all brevity.
I wrote at once to W. on the receipt of your news: I remonstrated with him for his impudence, and told him plainly that if he was going to behave so shabbily he had better at once give up the performance of Tannhäuser; and that, as he had not yet sent the honorarium, he had only in this case to send you back the score. All the same, let the copies ordered be finished: if not for Leipzig, they'll do for some other place. Now that I know the cost of the copies, I will in each case quote people the price in figures. Kind greetings to Heine; I cannot write to him to-day.
I have had an application from Hildburghausen (as per enclosed): I find it out of place that I should answer these people. Either I shall not answer at all, or you might undertake to call their attention to my biography in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt (1843), and to my Vorwort (as supplement). If you are willing to patch up something yourself, that's your affair. It is not of much importance, and at best is only a means of avoiding, or rather guarding against, silly mistakes.
You will be astonished at the number of places I have been to. I sent for Minna to come to Lugano: then with her once more Lago Maggiore, over Domodossola, Wallis, Martigny to Chamounix (see the drawing), Mer de Glace, etc., to Geneva, where I found your last letter. Now we are off home by Lausanne.
For this new journey I had set apart the twenty-five louis d'or of the Frankfort honorarium, advanced to me by Sulzer. I intended the Leipzig honorarium to cover the present deficit you already know of in the subvention I receive from the R.'s. And yet I am so daring in my transactions with W.!
I will write at length to you from Zurich! Nothing further to-day, except to say that the journey was a success.
Your
R. W.
(With a picture of the Chamounix Valley.)
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to His Dresden Friends, Theodor Uhlig, Wilhelm Fischer, and Ferdinand Heine, trans. J. S. Shedlock (Scribner & Welford, 1890), No. 71