[...] My life is a succession of wan and spiritless days. Nothing in the world gives me any joy, neither work of any sort, nor anything else. I can scarcely bring myself to write the most necessary letters! Perhaps I can call my condition a trial of patience! Complete uncertainty—that is all that I can express!—
I go out very little now—my distaste for everything is too great. I simply try to kill time and read Goethe at random. [...]
Liszt and Tausig left a week ago. I was glad to see the last of them—that is my present frame of mind! I can't get the thing I want, and nothing is any help to me. Liszt's way of life seems strange to me, to be sure. I met him for the first time twenty years ago in Paris, when in my then very precarious circumstances. I had already conceived a profound disgust for the world in which he fluttered about before my eyes, all brilliance and glitter. And now, when to my cost Fate has brought me again into contact with that world, when the experiences of my youth are repeated, and when nothing—no illusion, no show—has power any longer to persuade me to go an inch to meet that world, there is Liszt again, basking in its brilliance before my very eyes! [...] No one knows better than he what kind of prize is to be attained there. Accordingly, I shall do him truer justice if I suppose that the true prize is still denied even to him, though he likes from time to time to intoxicate himself with shows. [...] I could not follow him to any of his haunts, so I saw little of him. However, I have promised to visit him in Weimar for a couple of weeks. He means to compose some big symphonic works there. [...]
My sole interest is the Tristan project. Do consider whether you can do anything to persuade Papa to spend the autumn and a part of the winter in Vienna this year. [...] You would then have a quiet opportunity of hearing all that I have to offer: Tristan, Lohengrin, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser. It would really make a homely winter of it for you. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 493