Dear Friend,
You will only get a few lines to-day. After some interruption (through indisposition) I am now bent on devoting all my working power to the completion of the Rheingold, and I will not make a break by long letter-writing until I have finished: this will happen, however, in the present week, and at the end of it I therefore promise you a real letter. So you must have patience with me.
So to-day (after my working time) only two words!
Health. I am glad that I have alarmed you; for this was just my aim. More about this shortly.
Business. Send to Michaelson the score for Riga, with four copies of the Guide to performance: they are paid for. If he writes to you about Rostock (!!), and encloses a postal certificate, send likewise a score and four pamphlets. He asks me besides for some books of words; send him half a dozen. Tell X. to be always on the look-out about the books of words; he ought at once to assert his rights at each theatre. (Has he not done this at Wiesbaden?)
For Heaven's sake spare me the threatened vouchers for your disbursements! Pedant, what am I to think of you? Also I do not want the Dresden Tannhäuser literature.
Neither do I want the machine: there is here an improvement on it by Liebig. You acted quite sensibly in keeping part of the money: I had forgotten it.
See to three tickets, third tier, for the next Tannhäuser performance, for my wife's family. Your own is to go to the amphitheatre. Had not a dressmaker's assistant written at once about it to my wife, I should have known nothing whatever about the performance.
Do you feel inclined to make the pianoforte score of Iphigenia in Aulis from my arrangement (Bearbeitung)? I have offered it to Härtels.
Mosewius has written to me in a touching manner; under his own name he has also written about Tannhäuser in some Breslau paper. Would you like to have it?
Nothing more to-day! Take for breakfast Cacoigna, cocoa purified from all fat: I do so — most easy to digest and very nourishing.
At the end of the week, more details! Till then, have good courage, and hold in kind remembrance
Your
R. W.
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to His Dresden Friends, Theodor Uhlig, Wilhelm Fischer, and Ferdinand Heine, trans. J. S. Shedlock (Scribner & Welford, 1890), No. 87