Best Friend,
These lines will probably reach you at the same time as the score I sent off yesterday. I will only add something I omitted. Possibly you have already sent off a score to Breslau: in any case, it is certainly best to have the ending of the Overture and of the last Finale written afresh: it is not much — eight pages in the Overture, from page 43 on, and five pages in the Finale, from page 409 on. But in the case of the Overture detailed instructions for the phrasing also must be added — perhaps in a textual note, indicating page and bar. If you have not already sent off the score, you might do this at once as soon as the rest is finished, and say that the other would follow. Good heavens! I am quite unhappy at the terrible delay through this dilly-dallying: in Breslau the performance was to take place in the middle of this very month, and the fault is owing to that alone.
Do write without paying the postage. Good-bye!
Your
R. W.
Mehner (extra musician) is a good and careful copyist. Make haste about Schwerin too!!
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to His Dresden Friends, Theodor Uhlig, Wilhelm Fischer, and Ferdinand Heine, trans. J. S. Shedlock (Scribner & Welford, 1890), No. 112