Dear Kapellmeisterin!
[...] I find Liszt more admirable than ever. Taciturn fellow that he is, how loud speaks his every deed! His many-sided artistic activities astound me, well as I know that such is our only way of enduring suffering.—His "programmes" excite me so that I pine to get to know his Symphonic Poems as the most desirable experience I can possibly hope for in the field of art. Could he not at least send me the scores, as it will not be easy for me to hear him perform the works? How reserved he is with me!
His essays for Brendel's [New Musical] Journal are amazingly fine; one seems all at once to see Poetry enter the dry-as-dust publication in person. And how shrewdly logical Liszt is, for all this play of imagination; it is the shrewdness of genius at its highest and most passionate. What a pity that it is really written only for us! Who else understands it?
I am touched to the heart that he wants to weave yet another garland for the grave of the Dutchman. This tender piety is Liszt's alone. He alone would feel there was life in the deceased; it would occur to no one else to trouble himself about this "outworn point of view." The child will have told you how my Rhine Maidens are progressing. I cannot rest until I begin The Valkyrie.—[...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 262