[...] I am much obliged to you for your favourable answer, and thank your esteemed firm for seriously considering my proposal that my Rhinegold should be accepted for publication. I acknowledge that the music-drama in question is only calculated to fill an entire evening by means of a new device, proper to the subject, according to which the finale of each act is characterised by a sustained change of some considerable duration (in the musical interlude), and this again makes it possible to keep the duration of performance, without injustice to a three-act opera, within the space of two and three-quarters to three hours, as is so often desired.
With regard to your other esteemed counter-suggestions, it only remains for me to attempt to come to an understanding upon the question of the honorarium. Whether, indeed, I shall succeed I do not know.
The honorarium I have asked of you is well considered. It is based on the supposition that exclusive rights in a dramatic work of mine, both at home and abroad, supplemented by the sale of rights in song extracts, saleable to French publishers, for example, for the issue of editions with French libretto, etc., will bring in considerable sums to-day and still more in the future. [...]
As you [...] have no objection to the amount of my demand in itself, but only wish me to abate it so that the pianoforte arrangement may be sold at a cheaper price, I take it that you are inclined to accept my estimate of the favourable chances in this business and that the above remarks are in a sense superfluous.
I am likewise unable to acquiesce in the reason alleged by you for wishing to make the price lower. If a cheaper issue of the pianoforte arrangement will make it accessible to less wealthy music-lovers, it simply means that you will have a wider market, and the profits on a greater number of cheap copies must, on any sensible view of the matter, equal those on the sale of a smaller number of dear copies. Indeed, experience has often taught that they tend to exceed them, provided that the work itself possesses a popular appeal, and this must be the presumption where a cheaper edition is thought suitable.
As a matter of fact, however, I consider that The Rhinegold and the whole of my Nibelung cycle is as sure to appeal to the German spirit for all time as any other national work of the past, and it is my expectation of this exceptional popularity which encourages me to believe in a strong reaction upon France and England, to whom the door to this particular type of German poetry can only be opened by music.
Should you be able to bring [...] your views [...] into accordance with mine [...] it would simply remain for me to express the wish that the pianoforte arrangement, whatever the price at which you intend to sell it, should not fall short of the best and soundest standard as regards format and, at the least, should appear like (to be brief) that of Tristan and Isolde. I would ask the same for the full score, which we should have to agree about according to circumstances at the time of the first performances of the work. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 452