Here, dearest master, is a sort of Bayreuth Festival sermon. It has been impossible for me to keep my mouth shut, as there were certain things that I felt compelled to say. My pride and my confident hope is that I will thereby increase the joy of those who are now rejoicing. But how you yourself will take my confessions, it is impossible for me to surmise this time.
One of the disagreeable results of my literary habits is that each time I publish a work of any kind, some element in my personal relations is called into question, and it is only by an expenditure of humor that this can be set right again. I should not like to give articulate expression to the degree in which I feel this quite particularly today. I grow fairly dizzy with embarrassment when I consider what I have dared to do this time, and I appear to myself like the "Horseman on Lake Constance."
In one of the very first letters you wrote me, however, you said something about your firm belief in German freedom of thought; and it is to this belief that I address myself today. It is only by keeping this in mind that I have found the courage to do what I have done.
With a full heart, yours humbly, Fr. N.
Source: The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, trans. Caroline V. Kerr (Boni and Liveright, 1921), No. 51