My dear Friend Heckel!
At last I find time in which to offer my congratulations to you on your splendid success as well as my joy at the success of your performances.
Until now I was not to be diverted from my finishing touches in the composition of Parsifal; this is now completed, and you are the first person in the outside world to whom I address myself.
You have furnished a salutary example in Mannheim of what can be accomplished by a powerful will. Since I have been obliged to relinquish all idea of a repetition in Bayreuth, it is only by the most carefully prepared performances in our ordinary theatres that the permanent vitality of my work, if it is not to be altogether lost and forgotten, can be proven.
That you approached your voluntary task with apprehension, by anxiously comparing the scope of your own resources with those of the very largest Royal theatres, decided you to go ahead and follow out my principle of getting at the spirit of the thing. A director who is thoroughly initiated and who is, moreover, intelligent and energetic, and, above all, convinced—such a director, I say, furnishes me with the surest guarantee.
However much as I am pleased at the public praise of Fischer, I am not surprised. I knew what he could do.
It is a great good fortune that I have finally a theatre director who would offer a position to one of the few intelligent and well-trained conductors whom I have succeeded in winning (for my cause).
Until now my recommendations have always proved a detriment to those whom I have recommended; nothing is more odious to the directors of the Royal theatres than the so-called “Wagnerian.” For then they say: “Heaven help us! that means a person who will demand a lot of rehearsals, particularly if it is going badly; who, moreover, will not make any cuts, in spite of the fact that it will turn out much better if it is quite incomprehensible. No, indeed! I can get along much better with servile bunglers!” It was better in Mannheim this time, and I hope that the Leipzig performances will also be benefited by the fact that the director there has recently appointed one of my protégés—the colleague of Fischer at the Bayreuth performance. And our young Brandt as well!
There is something to be hoped for and expected there—that the entire management, to which I myself am under obligations, will be moved to do the proper thing. Under such circumstances singers and musicians accomplish wonders. I have experienced this. But—the chief wonder of all—Heckel as theatre-director! Good luck! Now I understand fate, and to you, who are in its care, I send cordial greetings.
Yours faithfully,
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. 113