My Beloved Friend!
With the closing of the year it is time, finally, to take care of the settling of my last debt to you. On this occasion — as ever! — I can only thank you, without being able to repay you with anything. I thank you for being good enough to grant my request at once! I had hoped truly, during the autumn, to allow myself a pleasure-trip to my old native land. But the one impulse — which alone is master of me now — to create a new work, compelled me to reject every effort towards such a diversion: in my seclusion in this place I have indeed experienced sufficient interruption of my leisure for work, and what disposition is still left to me, I have turned over entirely to my work. This is getting on well now — God be thanked! I hope to be able to produce The Mastersingers in admirable fashion next summer. Then — then — I shall see you again, you true friend, surely!
Now be kind enough to retain, out of the enclosed 80 thalers, 50 in repayment of your last disbursement for me, and pay over 30 thalers to good Natalie. It grieves me very much to see the business regarding the gravestone for my blessed wife still protracted through the calling-off of my visit to Dresden. If it will hurry things up in any way, then I beg you — if I may venture still to ask again for something? — to make the necessary arrangements in my name: any expenditures will be at once settled for. I should like to find out, through you, what would be the cost of an appropriate gravestone and inscription — a simple stone, but in keeping and substantial — and whether it could be finished at once, in case this cannot wait until my visit next summer?
Dear Anton! Life is becoming difficult for me, always more difficult. My imagination, still steadily productive, is my support; but I am nevertheless living only in order, properly speaking, not to belong to the world any more.
Good-bye! Greet your dear wife and dear children! Remain good to me! And be assured of my constant devoted friendship!
Your
Richard Wagner
Enclosed: Eighty thalers in Prussian bank-notes
Source: The Letters of Richard Wagner to Anton Pusinelli, trans. and ed. Elbert Lenrow (Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), No. 48