My highly esteemed Friend!
How deeply I regret to learn from your letter to my dear wife that you are placed in any uncertainty concerning me!
I should like very much to learn, from a plan which you should lay before me, wherein your justification for an agitation in favour of the Bayreuth idea consists, in order that I may do what is expected of me.
I only beg of you, in regard to the execution of your plan, to take into consideration my experience concerning the German world as well as myself.
I should not like you to place my proposed plan of September, 1877, too much in the foreground; as all the experience I have gained serves to show me that at that time—I confess not entirely unconsciously—I reckoned without my host. If, on the other hand, I take into consideration the hopes awakened in me and all my friends since you have come to our aid, I can see no other possibility of meeting your wishes than by—as you think—endeavouring to give a fresh impulse to the interest we failed to arouse with the Festival of 1876, by presenting Parsifal at the earliest possible moment.
This plan seems feasible for the year 1882, provided I can remain perfectly quiet until that time; but this only, as far as the material possibilities are concerned, in the event that I can lay claim to the assistance of the King of Bavaria.
Under such assured conditions I intend to present, in addition to the Parsifal, one of my older works each year, in turn, making these model performances my artistic testament to my friends. As I am to-day in my sixty-eighth year, I can count upon a ripe and vigorous old age for the realisation of this plan, and think I shall then have done enough to be released from the performance of Magic Flute, Freischütz, Fidelio, etc.
Anything I can do privately in the way of instruction and information I shall be glad to do—you only need to visit me here in Bayreuth.
If with each performance of my works I do not leave behind my “school,” then I have nothing whatever to do with a “school.” . . .
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. 115