If, from this capital city of France, I dare to address Your Majesty thus directly with a [...] petition [...] my excuse may perhaps be found in the fact that I, as a Saxon and Your Majesty's most faithful subject, could not bring myself to let pass what is, for me at least, an extraordinarily important occasion without satisfying the urgent longing, ever growing upon me in my exile, to express immediately my deepest and most entire devotion to my most gracious Lord and King.
Born in Leipzig, while yet a child I visited with my family Your Majesty's residence at Dresden where my stepfather Ludwig Geyer held the post of Court Player at Your Majesty's Court Theatre and had the immeasurable good fortune, being also a portrait painter, to be honoured by the most gracious favour of the King's Most Excellent Majesty with the royal commission to paint portraits of the most illustrious Royal Family.
I have devoted myself to musical composition and ten years ago had the good fortune to see some of my instrumental works performed with approbation in my native city. Since then I have held the post of director of music in several German cities; but, being inspired with the particular desire to distinguish myself in dramatic composition, yet feeling that the smaller provincial theatres of Germany were in no way adapted to found the fame of works first produced upon their boards, and not having at that time unfortunately the courage to turn, as now, with respectful confidence to Your Majesty's self, I at length decided to follow the example of so many Germans and to pursue my above-mentioned purpose in Paris.
My hopes for the success of my project were at first strengthened by my good fortune in winning the friendship of the renowned Herr Meyerbeer, whose patronage has already carried me so far that I am now in most friendly negotiation with the administration of the Académie Royale de Musique with regard to an opera to be composed especially for that theatre.
Nevertheless I have ever retained a burning desire to dedicate my best artistic powers to my German Fatherland. Urged by this ambition, I have completed here in Paris a grand opera entitled Rienzi, and I have done so with the express view of offering it for first performance to Your Majesty's Court Theatre. [...] I beg that Your Majesty may be pleased to grant that a first performance of my opera Rienzi, the score of which I am sending at once to Your Majesty's Master of the Household and to the Intendant of the Court Theatre, His Excellency Baron von Lüttichau, may take place upon Your Majesty's stage at Dresden. If Your Majesty in graciously acceding to this petition should think fit to grant me also the inexpressible happiness of being permitted to dedicate my work with the deepest respect to Your Most Gracious Majesty, the most brilliant reception by the public would appear to me insipid and worthless compared with the exalted consciousness of having seen my first considerable work come to birth under the particular and benevolent protection of my most gracious Lord and King and upon the soil of my Fatherland.—[...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 50