[...] I often have to laugh aloud when I raise my eyes from my work and see through my window the Tuileries and Louvre. You must know that my real self now is roaming the streets of Nuremberg and accordingly is dealing with a pretty angular and downright race of people. I have been forced to seek that sort of society.
The return journey from Venice to Vienna was very long. [...] It rings in my head now like an overture to The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. Back again in my Viennese hotel I worked out my scheme with remarkable speed. I was well pleased to notice in doing this how clear my memory had remained, and how ready and fertile my imagination was in invention! It was a real salvation—just, indeed, as approaching madness can sometimes save life! Well, then, I locked things up right and left, shot the bolt on Tristan for a year, politely refused various invitations to triumph in various towns of my glorious German Fatherland and—arrived where I now am to "forget that I am alive!" [...]
You, too, must leave me my Nuremberg Mastersingers for the present! They will turn out quite well and soon—probably at the beginning of next winter—run through the German theatres, where I shall not much trouble my head about them.
The performance of Tristan is still my main object. Once that is successful I shall have little more to do in this world, and shall willingly lie down to sleep with Master Cervantes. For my writing of Tristan I have to thank you, and I do so from the depths of my soul to all eternity! [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 509