My highly esteemed Sirs and Friends!
It will ever remain an impossibility for me to give adequate expression to my gratitude for, and recognition of, your great service in the undertaking I have initiated. This is the first thing which troubles me in responding now to your communication of to-day!
The second is that I am obliged to regard it as utterly impossible to pay my debt of deeply felt gratitude by yielding to your wish that our performances should take place in the coming year.
I thought that I had already expressed myself quite clearly and sufficiently on this point at our last meeting, and therefore can only repeat that the more seriously I force myself to look the matter squarely in the face, the more fully I am able to estimate the injury which the delay in the contracts has caused. . . .
As a result of this delay I have got out of touch with the personnel I previously had in view, and am obliged to start again from the very beginning in regard to securing a new one. For example, I could not now say to any singer, “Don't make any contract for the summer, in order that you may be at my disposal,” and I should regard myself as fortunate, should I be able to persuade any of the former ones to place themselves at my disposal for a few days, in addition to their other obligations.
Believe me, it is quite impossible to present the enormous four-part work, each part of which would require three months' preparation in the largest theatres, in the time which now remains for us, from now until next year.
That is one thing! The other is your suggestion and wish that the means be collected by my personal activity. Provided I should be successful in getting together considerable sums by constant travelling about and constant concert-giving, it grieves me to be obliged to declare to you that I could not endure the strain, and it is for this reason that I am obliged to provide myself with a conductor to assume these duties even for the Festival performances, a precaution which I was obliged to take in Munich in the past. I feel, more than either one of you, my highly esteemed friends, that the ultimate guarantee of the success of our great undertaking lies in the maintenance of my physical and mental vitality, because no one can estimate the task which I have imposed upon myself in this respect. And furthermore, my experience of the preceding year has convinced me that all these attempts to give a personal impetus to the matter in no way produce results commensurate with the effort made. On the contrary, I learned quite distinctly from the experience that it is not the idea which is preached beforehand, but the fact of the proposed musical performances, which may possibly arouse a certain degree of curious sympathy, and this eventually may procure for us the necessary funds. On the other hand, this sympathy can be increased by prolonging and thus exciting curiosity, provided the one fact remains firm, and that is the eventuality of the performances. By means of the rehearsals which will be held in the summer of 1875, with decorations, etc., this interest can be raised to a profitable degree of impatience—which would be all the better for us.
I am quite clear about this. But that about which I am quite in the dark is, how I am to persuade myself to invite fifteen hundred guests (apart from my personnel), among them most distinguished personalities, in the present condition of the entertaining strength of Bayreuth. This it is, my highly esteemed friends, which is so serious a point that I am forced to beg of you to throw some light on the subject, which will quiet my anxieties.
I do not believe that it will be possible for you to convince me that, by the means which up to the present have been used, a thousand patrons, most of them from aristocratic circles, to say nothing of five hundred free seats, can be so accommodated in our hotels and private houses as not to convert the assembling in Bayreuth into a disagreeable experience, which would make the repetition of the Festival an impossibility the year following.
I therefore regard it as my duty, my highly valued friends, to beg of you to arrange a meeting for an early date for deliberating this very important point, and as far as I am able to judge of the difficulty of the situation, you will find it by no means too early for serious consideration of the matter, if we expect to receive the guests of the Festival in a befitting manner in the summer of 1876, so that they will cherish no manifest objection to coming again in the year 1877.
May you receive this answer in a friendly and considerate manner, as the conviction of one deeply serious and also of one weighed down with cares,—for the faith's sake,—and I beg of you to ascribe it to my great gratitude toward you.
With the deepest respect.
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. 56