Dear Old Fellow!
A commission (not a request, because that, in fine, you would not grant me: whereas I presume that as my duly appointed manager you would attend to my "commission"!)
So!
If by this evening you have not received back the score of Tannhäuser, then
I commission you
at once to write to the General-Intendant of the Royal Theatre in Berlin, and request that the said score be forthwith returned, as I have otherwise disposed of it.
But I hope you already have it: for I now know for certain that in any case the Berlin people would not have given the Tannhäuser.
But all this will probably turn out well. Only rely (you and Heine also) upon Liszt, as I do.
Good-bye for to-day, you excellent business-manager!
Soon more from your godless
R. Wagner.
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to His Dresden Friends, Theodor Uhlig, Wilhelm Fischer, and Ferdinand Heine, trans. J. S. Shedlock (Scribner & Welford, 1890), No. 114