[...] If you could shortly come and make brief stays with me from time to time it would give me great pleasure. We should also delight the young King of Bavaria, who, because of Court mourning, cannot be present at public performances of music, by playing to him fragments of my new works on the pianoforte. [...]
[...] I am to be forever with him, so that, free from every care, I can compose, and produce what I have composed, he providing all the means.
I have promised, moreover, to complete The Nibelungs. He will see to it that the German nation is presented with a performance of my work just as I would wish it to be. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 580