My Dear Good Fischer!
How are you, then, and how is Heine? Did he give you my greetings last summer? I live now in the greatest retirement from the world, even from Zurich, i.e., I seldom go into the town, but instead live quietly in my pleasant little country house, watch my wife attending to the garden, work, and go for walks in a pleasant valley: that is my whole life. Yet I have had German visitors: Ed. Devrient, Prager, and Röckel (from England), Robert Franz, etc., etc., were this summer with me for a longer or shorter period, and we had a lot of music — Rheingold, Walküre, and the two finished acts of Junge Siegfried. I am now composing Tristan und Isolde, about which Heine has probably told you something. I hope to finish it next summer, and with this work to offer the theatres a task easy to master. But I must first produce it somewhere myself: otherwise I do not give it forth. I will wait and see how it succeeds, and what the possibilities are.
I have really little hopes of Dresden: the King is personally averse to me. For the rest, I should think my stupid Dresden game of nine years back has been forgotten now?
Meanwhile, as Heaven wills: if I should never receive an amnesty, I must console myself with the thought that I should never have got much joy from the German theatres.
Greetings to Tichatschek from me. I do not really know what to think of him. About Easter he wrote to me that he was then leaving Dresden for several months, and would be glad to see me again. Well, I kept on waiting for his visit: I would have written to him again about it, if I had only known where to. For he went, in fact, on his travels. Now that he has not come, and has written nothing further to me thereon, I am as much surprised as grieved at heart.
Well, our Prague enthusiast, Apt, has also been here. I was glad to get news of you through him. He wished absolutely to buy a score of Rienzi, and I promised to write to you about it. But I think I shall do better to keep back the few scores still remaining; the opera cannot, after all, be smothered, and I will do nothing to injure it, just out of consideration for K. and P., who, by the circulation of Rienzi, may be able to make profit. I therefore ask you to lend a score to Apt; he can keep it for a while, and have copied out of it what he wants.
You gave me hopes of a visit from the music-publisher M.; now, unfortunately, he has not come, and, on the other hand, I hear of nothing but fresh confusion and lack of energy in the management of the business. The pianoforte arrangement without words of Tannhäuser (so profitable for the market) is still not out! Do persuade M. to write categorically to me about the whole matter.
As regards Tristan, that must remain between ourselves. I will not let anything leak out concerning it.
And now, you good, bad old friend! when shall I at last see you again?? You and Heine must visit me next summer and stay with me; if you don't do that I will never in my life write to you again! But now, last of all, a thousand greetings to yourself, and greet Wilhelm, and let all of you hold me dear.
Adieu, good old fellow!
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. 144