To the Five Righteous, greeting and blessing!
Have thanks, dear friends, for your loyal zeal! Everything was splendid, — only, my old friend R. Pohl should have known to express himself better. "Self-intelligible"! proves that he hasn't read "German Art and German Policy" attentively enough. There our Herr "Speaker" had the best of him. By now you will have received my "Report etc." But you will be more expressly concerned with what I am saying in a "Communication to the W.-Vereins" — in the 2nd number of the Musikalisches Wochenblatt. I fancy it will be of help to you — and consequently to us.
Glad am I to hear of the "massive" state of things. I'm building on it, there at Bayreuth, and don't know if we shan't be left in a hole at the last. Everybody must be prepared to commit the common purse in May to my excellent banker Feustel at Bayreuth. For that matter, I see that I shall have to begin to put in a word myself, to give the thing a centre. I imagine the "Righteous" will agree with me. Naturally the admirable Loen could only be conductor for the first stage.
Lectures? — My God! — Very good! But who's to lecture? In any case he would need a finer voice than X of W., — he might also be less tedious. That's a terrible person (between our six selves)!
The soul and intellect for such a thing might be found in H. Porges of Munich. Possibly he might be persuaded. You'd better write and tell him that I've recommended him. I fancy he's somewhere in Augsburg just now. Franz Mrazeck, 3 Wittelsbacher Platz (my Munich address) would know where a letter would find him.
For the rest, I'm living on the handsome expectations of the German National spirit to which I am referred on every hand.
What gives me joy, is people like yourselves, honoured friends: you know what — and why. The rest may go hang, like the pious speech of Herr Km. Lachner!
A thousand thanks for all the friendly tokens of your kindness and affection; I have received them with much emotion!
Once more, the heartiest greetings of
Yours faithfully
Richard Wagner.
(formerly ward of the "European Court.")
P.S. — If I do not greet the Righteous in the explicit name of my wife, it is on the supposition that they know — by experience — I do nothing whatever without her, — so that she is everywhere in all I utter.
R. W.
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner to Emil Heckel, with a Brief History of the Bayreuth Festivals, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Grant Richards, 1899), No. 15