My Most Honoured Friend!
It is long since you heard anything from me and perhaps you were already under the happy delusion that I was no more. However, I still exist, though separated by some 100 miles from civilised Germany. You can well imagine with what mad longing I cling to every remaining hope derived from that far world. You are among those hopes and must therefore forgive me if I clutch at least at your coat-sleeve. Well now, to the matter, an it please you! I should like to speak my mind and come to the point at once. You know that at the end of last year I finished an opera, Das Liebesverbot oder die Novize von Palermo, the libretto from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Devil knows how it is, but I don't think the opera is bad, and our friend Banck, to whom I showed it, was of the same opinion without being asked. The thing is unsuitable on German soil, both subject and music, and even if I wished to adapt it particularly to Germany, what gigantic difficulties has not the unknown German composer to face in order to find favour in Germany! That is, indeed, the curse under which all German opera labours! I really do not know where I should try to fix it. I barred Leipzig from the first because the subject would not be to the taste of the great Ringelhardt. I shall stumble on similar obstacles on every German stage, particularly as I am practically banished here in Siberia and my presence is prohibited in places where my personal influence counts for a little. Furthermore, what good would it be to me if I did succeed in Breslau or Braunschweig, places of which I had hopes? It would lead to nothing! I will make a bold bid for it and attempt Paris. The thing would just suit the Opéra Comique. Some time ago I sent Scribe the plan of a great operatic subject [Die hohe Braut] in five acts. The subject is brilliant in the extreme and I have implored Scribe to lend his name, his labours and his patronage to it. I have no answer as yet, and as he is always travelling it is likely that he has not got my letter yet. Now, I should like to send my comic opera direct to the manager of the Opéra Comique. He might first have the music and plot criticised by Auber (and God knows whom else) and then, should it please him, he might have the libretto worked up by anyone he chose and the music adapted. I think the idea's not so bad. My God!—Auber can't surely write him a new opera every month and why shouldn't the originality of the idea please him? When all's said and done it's only an experiment.
First, however, I turn once more to you. You have, of course, manifold connections with Parisian authorities. Could you not tell me some good way of attaining my end with them? Or, if not, could you not at least send me, through your correspondents, the exact address of the entrepreneurs of the Opéra Comique and the easiest way of getting at them? Please see what can be done. If you yourself should light upon the most appropriate method of conducting the affair, I would send the score to you at Leipzig so that you may know approximately what you have to deal with. Now, just tell me, O most honoured patron of the Romantic School, what, roughly, is your opinion of it, what may be hoped for it, and what made of it. Established upon the very hub of speculative criticism, you will certainly be able to give me something more judicious to go upon than I am likely to get from anyone here in Prussian Siberia. Anyhow I place this amount of trust in your cosmopolitanism, that you will not leave me unnoticed, and I earnestly implore an answer. Sobolevski told me yesterday that someone had brought him a new sonata of yours. To-day or to-morrow I am visiting him and he is to play it to me, for I am too bad a pianist myself to want to massacre it with my own hands.
[...] You did not, apparently, accept my article written from Berlin at the end of May—you were disturbed by my polemic in this form against Rellstab, perhaps? No offence! [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 39