[...] [Alexander] Müller has told me [...] marvels about your performances of Lohengrin. Be ever assured of my warmest thanks! [...]
As to my new poem, The Ring of the Nibelungs, I am now regretting terribly that—for hard cash too—I had fifty copies of it printed. It is not only that I cannot prevent the book getting into the hands of totally unauthorised persons, but I now feel that even my friends ought not really to have this poem before it is set to music and—I would almost add—produced as well. I see more and more clearly that the work I have on hand is something which I ought to get done, and ought not to permit to be endlessly discussed. Instead of concentrating on the poem before them and on its purely poetic aspect, people are always seizing upon the purely technical aspect of a conjectured musical setting, as if such a poem only came into being to give the usual operatic composer occasion for a discharge of music instead of being, as it is, rooted and grounded in itself, in the life and the view of life of the poet, bringing to the musician a new subject to which, and in which, he must discover new music—that is music suited to this subject and to this subject alone. Since, accordingly, the musical (and also the scenic) setting is necessarily my secret, only discoverable by myself when all is complete, nothing could be more distressing to me now than to have to hear this intimate artistic secret of mine discussed by others—publicly, perhaps, at last. In short, I wish I could recall all the copies I have given away. Only come and see me soon, and I will read it to you, sing what is already done and talk to you about it;—after that you can take a copy away with you if you would like to have one! But I would rather do nothing to increase the misunderstandings which distress me. Please don't take this the wrong way!—[...] You will be getting an alteration in the close of Tannhäuser from Dresden, according to which the corpse of Elizabeth does not appear, nor do the Landgrave and singers come on, but instead of them the younger pilgrims singing, as in the first version. All the rest remains, necessarily—the whole Venus incident, etc., up to "Holy Elizabeth, pray for me,"—after which comes the earlier close. The young pilgrims carry the budding staff in their midst.—Previously the death of Elizabeth has been merely indicated by the light of torches on the Wartburg, tolling of bells and men's voices chanting from there (that is from above).—
All the talk about the appearance of a corpse and prosaic calculations about the physical, anatomical and social possibilities of this burial of Elizabeth "in so short a time" (how fortunate that on such occasions people have time to think about time!) have so disgusted me at last that I decided on this alteration—or reversion, rather.—[...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 249