Your silence, dear Heinemännel, almost makes me melancholy. Either you are very ill, or you are angry with me. Say, have you taken anything amiss? Perhaps my last remarks on your communication respecting the scenarium for Lohengrin? This I must almost believe, especially as the scenic indications have been entirely omitted from the little work that has appeared. Certainly that annoyed you with me, and you thought, "If he knows better, let him do it himself." If I were right? Then you were wrong! Well, I will say no more about it, for perhaps I am altogether in the wrong with regard to the whole suspicion, so truly painful as it is to me! Please inform me soon!
I have now received the scenarium: you have done your work well — yes, in many ways too well! I owe you so many thanks for it, that I should feel quite inconsolable if I had to think that in reward for your friendly trouble I had hurt your feelings on this occasion! Do set my mind at rest about it!
Everything, as I said, answers perfectly to my wish: where you have differed somewhat from me in the scenery — as in the lay of the river in the First Act — I fully acknowledge that your corrections are right. I should only have liked, in the Castle courtyard, the balcony and stairs from the Kemenate down to the Palace brought somewhat more into view, which could have been very well done by shifting the palace-tower more to one side, to the right. But perhaps that could not be easily arranged otherwise — especially on small stages. In short, the whole is so good, that I must offer you my heartiest thanks for it in every respect!!
I need scarcely tell you, moreover, how unhappy I now feel at not being able to produce the work myself. To bring me into this deep discontent about the whole thing, it hardly needed the latest Leipzig outrage on my Lohengrin. As far as that goes, Fischer will laugh his fill at me, and will contrast my scruples regarding Dresden with my Leipzig levity. I must just put up with it, if he does not understand the state of matters. I only consented to the performance in Leipzig on condition that Liszt should represent me — if not as conductor, still as superintendent of the whole production; and he was to have the right to stop it, if he saw there was no reasonable expectation of a favourable result. Now first do I learn that R. quite set up his back against this, and that the whole thing would long ago have come to a rupture had it not been that Härtels effected a prudent compromise through Liszt's complaisance, whereby the latter was only to come occasionally to the general rehearsals, and perhaps give a few friendly hints to R. Now, no single notice seems to have been given to Liszt of the rehearsals, and he has had the somewhat too diplomatic weakness of leaving the affair to take its own course for good or bad.
But that was certainly not my intention, and so the performance has taken place entirely against my will. I shall take other precautions for the future. Fischer, besides, is quite out of temper with me: I have corresponded with him all the summer on mere matters of business, and it were high time to let him have some little news as friend. But I tell him and you that of late I have written to almost no one, so up to my ears was I with composition. Since I returned from Paris — beginning of November — I have written the music to Rheingold; I got so enthusiastic over it, that until it was finished I had neither ears nor eyes for anything else. Give heartiest greetings to my dear old friend, and make my excuses also to his Wilhelm; in the matter of letters one must not be too hard on me just now, when I have really a fearful amount of correspondence. But this very month I will write to our plump friend: if he wishes meanwhile to heap coals of fire upon my head, let him revise a score of the Flying Dutchman, and send it to the management at Wiesbaden. Tannhäuser must also be kept ready: orders are again drawing on. I shall not begin a fresh sheet until I get news again from thee and you. Very soon! And now best greetings to yours, and keep 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. 175