O you most excellent Man!
Accept my most heartfelt thanks for that which you are doing, and which it is not necessary to specify further! You can console yourself with the thought that if the ways and means which you are pursuing do not lead to the goal, then nothing else—of an honourable nature—would help us.
God knows, possibly you will find that much good comes even from the newspapers; I have often noticed that a lack of understanding creates more confusion than pure malice!
I go to-morrow to Munich to see if there is any hope of interposition on the part of the King.
Even if worse happens, we shall still be able to keep to the year 1875, if this winter bears good fruit! If I am able to close with Brandt and Hoffmann definitely in the spring, then they will still have time enough—according to their earlier statements—in which to get ready. I shall have a conference with both of them here, at the end of this month.
Therefore—let us hope! Through the measures which you are taking with such energetic caution, we shall learn in the end the still latent power of the German character; that is the consideration which almost outweighs the success of the undertaking itself.
A thousand cordial greetings to you and yours from me and my dear wife.
Yours,
Richard Wagner.
Source: The Story of Bayreuth as Told in the Bayreuth Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Caroline V. Kerr (Small, Maynard and Company, 1912), No. 50