Dearest Heinemann,
I have kept on thinking it was your turn to write to me, as you owe me news about yourself and family, since — as you know — the letter per the famous Fräulein E. (or somehow) has not reached me. So I only write to-day to remind you about writing. Especially do I beg for news about Wilhelm; I should also particularly like to have his address.
Before I know from yourself how you are, I will just tell you this about my doings: that I have become a complete water-man. This time I was ten weeks in the hydropathic establishment; only on account of the winter setting in early and with great severity have I given up the cure for the present. However, it was sufficient to give me the clearest foretaste of perfect health, a new and indescribable feeling of comfort, of which not one of us has any idea until he has experienced it (for it is well known that we are made ill from youth upwards, so that we have absolutely no consciousness of health!); and this complete health I will win for myself next spring, when I shall go again to the hydropathic establishment. I shall pass the winter in comfortably lounging about as much as possible — the only thing which I find somewhat irksome — in order when summer comes to set to the greatest work of my life in full harness and restored to health. Concerning that work I tell you nothing here, because you will shortly read more about it in an "Address to my Friends," which I shall put as "Preface" to the edition of my Three Opera-poems (Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin). So enough for the present!
Do you know where the Frommanns live? If so, please send them the enclosed lines!
So, Nante, write! To your wife and child heartiest greetings from myself and Minna, who is quite well and cheerful! Farewell, 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. 168