[...] I admire the courage with which you tackle Tannhäuser. I know how little time we can get in our theatres and accordingly can only suppose that a practical fellow like yourself contrives to make the most of this little time.
It is to be hoped you know Tannhäuser and realise how much trouble and worry it will cost you, but if you are entering on the affair with full knowledge, if you understand the difficulties of the task you are undertaking and set about achieving a good result with a will [...], you will give me great joy and I shall be very grateful to you. Whether or no you have been observing me lately, you probably know this much of me, that in a certain sense the modern public no longer exists for me. Whether it gets to know me or not, whether it learns to love me or not, is a matter of comparative indifference to my innermost feelings. I am all the more pleased when I win friends for myself as I really am, and, few or many, if they are real friends their number is nothing to me. In my youth I called you friend. Life has divided us spatially—and perhaps spiritually too—one going one way, one another, and a vexatious rivalry, which I have never been clear about, once made us almost enemies. Could I now succeed in doing consciously, what once occurred unconsciously—that is in making a friend of you—I should esteem it a double prize, for together with the old friend I should have made a new one. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 218