[...] "Man proposes and God disposes!"—After I last wrote to you from here, a bad illness (typhoid fever) overtook me and robbed me of power to do anything till now. Now I am recovering and am shortly going back to Penzing to finish The Mastersingers at a sitting. I am about to conclude a bargain with the Viennese Opera for a first performance of the opera in the course of next January. [...] The principal part of the whole is roughly drafted and the first act is finished in every detail. The last page of the full score must be in the hands of the copyist by the end of the year. Please do your part to help! Begin to print at once. If you had already done so, I would now send you another large consignment of the manuscript, but since you have not yet begun and I am going back to Penzing, and as Tausig is still in Vienna, I will have Act I. arranged by him first. At the end of May you shall have this remainder with the pianoforte arrangement. I give you my word of honour not to abandon this work, which is of first importance to me now, and to deliver it to you complete and ready for performance by the end of this year. I am ready to enter into any formal agreement to this effect. Last autumn you offered to pay me the advance of three thousand gulden I then asked you for, in monthly instalments of five hundred gulden in return for my undertaking to have the work finished in six months. [...] Since you have been so kind as to place the first fifteen hundred gulden actually at my disposal, will you now please make me the other payments in monthly instalments of two hundred gulden? In this way I can be secure of a peaceful livelihood just for the period of my work. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 569