Most valued friend!
At present my roof shelters a Brandenburg singing teacher from Zurich, to whom I am paying a terrifying salary for copying out my difficult manuscript. Moved to compassion by your letter, I have given much thought to the matter and tried to find some way of rescuing this worthy Swabian from the lion's den, but just as soon as the most urgent copy has been sent off, I shall have no further use for such a musician until I am ready with the instrumentation. That will not be before next summer, and I am not in a position, therefore, to help the poor man other than by a small gift of money, and will ask you to hand him twenty francs in my name and charge this sum to my account. My wife has written you today of our Mannheim adventure. May we not cherish the hope that you will join us? . . .
My hopes are placed in Nietzsche, if only Fritzsch serves him as he should. During the last few days, my gaze wandered from Genelli's Dionysus among the Muses to your last work (that is to say, in so far as I am acquainted with it!) with a feeling of the most genuine astonishment. It was as if some oracle had revealed a message to me. It is a singular, in fact a marvellous coincidence, this thing of seeing my own life, as it were, reproduced in your thoughts as you here portray them.
Can you not get away some Saturday before we leave, which will be about the ninth of December? That would be delightful. As you know, I no longer give you a definite invitation, and, therefore, you are spared all embarrassment in case you do not come.
With cordial greetings.
Source: The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, trans. Caroline V. Kerr (Boni and Liveright, 1921), No. 20