My Dear, Truest of All True Friends!
Your lines have touched me to tears, which this time are caused by your love! But I left your letter unread for several hours, after opening it: a first glance at a passage in it made me anticipate a fresh misfortune that you perhaps were communicating, and — I felt entirely incapable of enduring a new dread of death. — Finally, the error was solved, and I had only to thank you for this fresh proof of your noble sympathy, without having to be alarmed anew at the strange design of my destiny, which appears to tend my wounds only to the point where I may once again be able to receive new death-blows without immediately succumbing!
Don't be angry with me if I confess that on 23 July (Sunday) I was for two hours in Dresden without seeking you out. I wanted to see my Ludwig once more and press a last kiss on his brow — in spite of the fact that this would lead me right to — Dresden. I arrived about two hours too late: the confusion of the choral festival had delayed the trains: the doctors had ordered the funeral to be hastened. — I found only his lamenting wife at home. It was impossible to linger in Dresden: I went at once, almost blind, to the Prague station from which the train for Prague left at once. Thus I arrived directly back in Munich.
Since then, I have felt a paralysis and weakness of my nerves such as I have never known hitherto. I hope in a few days to withdraw to a little hunting-lodge of the King's, high up in the mountains — alone in the forest. Perhaps there the air and quiet will give me strength.
Tristan will never be produced again. This will be the monument to my noble singer!
It still seems only like a dream that I have lost him!
When the frightful pain of inflammation in his knee broke out, death forthwith stood before him, and he cried: "Farewell, Siegfried! — Console my Richard!"
Now I still have another Ludwig, young, ideal, ardently enthusiastic, devoted to me to the point of passion! — Oh, what anxiety do I feel for him!!
Good-bye, my dear, dear Anton! — A thousand tears give thanks for your love!
Your
R. W.
Source: The Letters of Richard Wagner to Anton Pusinelli, trans. and ed. Elbert Lenrow (Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), No. 40