Wagner's Letters
Correspondence by, to, and around Richard Wagner
Wagner’s letters run from a seventeen-year-old offering a publisher his piano arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth to a note from Venice a month before his death. Written to patrons, friends, lovers, singers and creditors, they are less guarded than anything he published. They follow his hopes for art from the revolutionary years in Dresden and Zurich, through Schopenhauer and his love for Mathilde Wesendonck, to King Ludwig, Bayreuth and Parsifal.
The letters are arranged by date and can be browsed by correspondent, so that Wagner’s side may be read alongside the replies of Liszt, Nietzsche, Minna Wagner and others. These letters have been compiled from available English-language collections; some letters may be repeated in translations by different translators.
In the letters the thought of the prose is lived: plans conceived, defended, abandoned and reborn amid poverty, exile and scandal. One conviction holds throughout, that art is a matter of life and death and not a trade. What changes is what he hoped art would accomplish. In Dresden and Zurich it is the festival of a free humanity, upheld by a Feuerbachian faith in love. From 1854 Schopenhauer turns it toward renunciation and compassion, a turn the letters to Mathilde Wesendonck give an almost devotional intensity. With King Ludwig it becomes a mission he believed he had been sent to fulfil, and at Bayreuth a sacred stage, ending with Parsifal, which he called his farewell to the world.
The apprentice years. The earliest letters, from Leipzig, Würzburg, Magdeburg and Riga, are those of an ambitious young theatre musician in the spirit of Young Germany, an “epicure” in art who wanted “nothing for posterity, everything for contemporaries.” They chart his courtship of the actress Minna Planer, debts, flights from creditors, and a hunger for Paris and Italy. Paris from 1839 brought hunger of a more literal kind: pawned rings, begging letters, fawning appeals to Meyerbeer, and a hatred of money as “the curse that destroys whatever is noble.” Out of that misery came the first statement of a lifelong faith. Writing to Kietz in 1842, he asked what would have become of him had he not thrown himself “with ever growing faith into the arms of Art,” and added, “I know now who I am.”
Dresden and revolution. The triumph of Rienzi in 1842 made him Kapellmeister at the Saxon court, and the letters of the next years show him striking out “a way markedly different” with The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. He described the last as the contact between “a metaphysical phenomenon and human nature, and the impossibility that such contact will last.” Self-publishing his scores ruined him, quarrels with the court theatre multiplied, and contempt for the modern stage hardened into politics: “the means we must use is Revolution!” he wrote in 1847. During the May uprising of 1849 he told Minna that he and his comrades were revolutionaries “only in order to construct something on fresh ground.” A warrant followed, and with it exile.
Zurich and the artwork of the future. The Zurich letters, above all to Liszt, Theodor Uhlig and August Röckel, are the workshop of the theoretical writings and the Ring. Their faith is humanist and Feuerbachian. “My God is my art and the principle of beauty, nobility, and truth,” he told Ferdinand Heine in 1849, and against Liszt’s plea that he find salvation in Christ he answered in 1853, “I believe in mankind, and require nothing further.” He imagined the Ring performed in a temporary theatre on the Rhine after the revolution, before a public admitted free, to make clear “the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense.” Yet beside the hope runs a darker refrain: art, he wrote, “begins at precisely the point where life breaks off,” a substitute for the love life denied him. The great letter to Röckel of January 1854 reads the Ring as a drama of love against power, in which Wotan rises “to the tragic heights of willing his own destruction” and the lesson is “We must learn to die.”
Schopenhauer, Wesendonck and Tristan. In December 1854 he told Liszt that Schopenhauer had come “like a gift from heaven,” and that his “final negation of the desire of life” showed “the only salvation possible.” In the same letter he conceived Tristan und Isolde as a monument to a love he had never known. Later letters to Röckel reread his own operas through the new philosophy, finding in them since the Dutchman “the sublime tragedy of renunciation.” His love for Mathilde Wesendonck, his neighbour at the Asyl from 1857, became the living form of this thought. When the household broke apart in 1858 he wrote to her of the only salvation left: “Rest from longing! The stilling of every desire!” In Venice he finished the second act of Tristan, confessing to Bülow that “were I not an artist, I could become a saint.”
The wandering years. From 1859 to 1864 the letters follow him from Lucerne, where Tristan was completed, to Paris and the fiasco of Tannhäuser at the Opéra in 1861, then to Biebrich, where Die Meistersinger began as a kind of rescue, and to Vienna, where Tristan was abandoned after more than seventy rehearsals. His final renunciation of Mathilde, his separation from Minna, mounting debts and a flight from Vienna to escape his creditors brought him by the spring of 1864 close to despair.
Ludwig, Munich and Tribschen. In May 1864 the eighteen-year-old King Ludwig II of Bavaria summoned him to Munich and paid his debts. The letters between them are among the strangest in the collection, ecstatic on both sides; Wagner wrote that the King had been sent to him “by God in order that my belief shall become a religion.” Tristan was performed in 1865, but the death of its Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr, the scandal of his affair with Cosima von Bülow and court hostility forced him out of Munich that December. At Tribschen near Lucerne, where he lived with Cosima from 1866, he finished Die Meistersinger, performed in Munich in 1868, returned to the Ring, married Cosima in 1870, and found in the young Friedrich Nietzsche a disciple who saw him as the renewer of Greek tragedy.
Bayreuth. The festival he had imagined in Zurich took shape in the small Franconian town he chose in 1871 as a neutral place, “a kind of Washington of art.” The letters of the next five years are largely business: fundraising, patrons’ certificates, singers asked to serve “simply and solely” an artistic ideal for expenses only, a near collapse rescued by a royal loan in 1874. The first Ring of 1876 left a large deficit and deep disillusion. His enterprise, he told Heckel, had been a question put to the German public, “Will you?”, and he now assumed that they would not. Nietzsche, who in 1876 still celebrated each May as the anniversary of his “spiritual rebirth,” broke with him in 1878, and Wagner’s letters thereafter speak of him with pained bewilderment. Retreating into Parsifal, which he finished in 1882 and reserved for Bayreuth alone, Wagner spoke of himself as a man looking down on the world “as though from a cloud.” His last letter to Ludwig, from Venice in January 1883, calls the work “my farewell to life.”
Spirituality. The letters show that Wagner’s religious thought was not a late conversion but a lifelong search, and that it was always bound up with art. In Paris and Dresden art itself was his faith. In Zurich that faith took a communal and this-worldly form: love was the only redeemer, and the festival he dreamed of was a religious gathering without a church, answering a need that, as he put it in 1852, “can no longer be ecclesiastically religious.”
Schopenhauer gave this search a metaphysics, and with it an Eastern vocabulary. To Röckel in 1855 he described compassion with all that lives as “the root of all virtue” and “the true secret of redemption,” and wrote that the Buddha “spoke the language which most nearly gives expression to that lofty enlightenment.” “If you wish to find out my religion,” he told Mathilde Wesendonck, “read Usinar,” a legend from the Indian epics. He planned a Buddhist drama, Die Sieger, and in his Venice diary for her wrote that he had “involuntarily become a Buddhist.” Seeing an animal tormented, he told Jakob Sulzer, lifted “the veil of Maya” and gave him an insight into “the essence of life itself.” His love for Mathilde he described in the same terms: love was “the well-spring of my redemption,” and “only inside, within us, only deep down does salvation dwell.”
From the 1860s Christ moves to the centre without the Eastern strand disappearing. Writing to Ludwig on Good Friday 1865, he contrasted the God of power with the God who suffers and dwells in the heart, and in 1873 he said Parzival was meant “to preserve the world’s profoundest secret, the truest Christian faith, nay, to awaken that faith anew.” His Christianity remained heterodox. In 1879 he wrote to Constantin Frantz that the way from man to God “is compassion, and its everlasting name is Jesus,” and in 1880 he told Hans von Wolzogen that they must be “merciless in abandoning the Church and the priesthood” for the sake of a purified Christ. The Brahmin teaching stayed with him: joining an animal-protection society in 1879, he urged that people be reminded of “the Brahman’s great saying, ‘Tat twam asi’ (‘That art thou’),” as a way of ennobling Christianity. Die Sieger was set aside only because, as he wrote in 1882, Parsifal had absorbed it.
The response he wanted from his audience followed from this. From the start he insisted that drama speak to feeling rather than reflection, and in 1853 he wrote, “I do not proffer easy entertainment, I deal in terror and pity.” In 1875 he told his performers that the Greeks could celebrate art in the name of Apollo, but “we no longer had any gods.” By 1880 he called Parsifal “the most sacred of my works,” a drama in which “the most sublime mysteries of the Christian faith are openly presented,” and resolved that it should never be offered “as an amusement.” Bayreuth was to be a consecrated stage, and the experience he hoped for was less conversion than an awakening of compassion. In his last years, having lost hope in Germany and the age, he described his inner life as “a world not of hope but of trust.”
Antisemitism. Hostility to Jews runs through the letters from the 1830s to the end, often joined to his resentment of money, the press and rivals. It sharpened around Judaism in Music (1850), when he told Liszt that his hatred of Jewry was “as necessary to my nature as gall is to the blood,” and he defended the pamphlet’s reissue in 1869. In the Schopenhauer letters he identified Judaism with the worldly optimism he rejected and claimed it had distorted Christianity, and in later letters he blamed Jews, often alongside Jesuits, for the degeneration of German culture. Late letters adopt racial language influenced by Gobineau, and in 1881 he told Ludwig that he considered the Jewish race “the born enemy of pure humanity and all that is noble in man.” At the same time he worked closely with Jewish musicians and impresarios, among them Carl Tausig, Joseph Rubinstein, Angelo Neumann and Hermann Levi, who conducted the first Parsifal, and in 1881 he disclaimed any connection with the organized antisemitic movement then active in Berlin.
Because the collection contains thousands of letters, the table below is intended as a finding aid rather than a replacement for the individual letter pages. Use the filters to narrow the archive by year, month, correspondent, or direction, then open a letter to read the full text.
Note: An asterisk (*) next to the date indicates an exact date for the letter was unavailable and a date has been interpolated from context and ordering.
| Date | From | To | Place | Words | Subject |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| November 17, 1860 | Hans von Bülow | Richard Wagner | Berlin | 699 |
Hearing that Wagner has been ill in Paris, Bülow asks for news through Flaxland and for the date of the Tannhäuser premiere, which he means to attend. He reports Liszt's unusual depression, the Berlin Academy's rejection of Wagner by the votes of its musicians, introduces the young journalist Paul von Bojanowski, warns against Beckmann as a suspected French spy, and encloses a satirical poem on the Academy.
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| November 24, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | Paris | 209 |
Weak after four weeks of illness, Wagner asks Liszt to find him a copy of his Ring poem, of which he has none left, for a new edition, and begs him to come to Paris as promised.
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| November 25, 1860* | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 403 |
Wagner describes the regimen of rest that lets him attend the Tannhäuser rehearsals daily, recognises that his nerves are so damaged that he must never again sing whole acts or conduct as before, and wonders how he will finish his life-task. He advises Mathilde to postpone her visit until he has recovered, and is glad to be reconciled in thought with Frau Wille.
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| December 2, 1860 | Franz Liszt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 324 |
Liszt sends a copy of the Ring poem from Counsellor Müller via the French embassy courier, together with Franz Müller's book on Wagner. He asks about Wagner's publications, reports that Rienzi will open on Boxing Day under Stör, since Liszt declines to conduct it, and announces his transcriptions of the Spinning Song and Santo Spirito Cavaliere.
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| December 4, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 108 |
A hasty note of relief: Wagner's recovery is progressing well, the illness has been a serious warning that makes him plan his future carefully so as to fulfil his life-task, and he will bide his time over Tannhäuser, which he will not conduct himself.
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| December 6, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 142 |
Exhausted by an illness that has postponed Tannhäuser, Wagner asks Wesendonck once more for a loan, promising repayment at Easter and begging him to ignore the request entirely if it causes him the least inconvenience.
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| December 15, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Franz Liszt | Paris | 319 |
Slowly recovering, Wagner can manage only the Tannhäuser rehearsals at the Opéra; the Rhinegold proofs for Schott have lain untouched for seven weeks, and he still has to score the new Venus scene and compose the Venusberg ballet music. He thanks Liszt for the Ring poem and begs him to come to Paris.
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| December 16, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 321 |
Thanking Wesendonck for his prompt help, the convalescent Wagner reports that the first Venusberg dance-scene is still unwritten, that the new Venus–Tannhäuser scene has been worked out in the foyer with extraordinary effect, and that his authority at the Opéra is stronger than ever thanks to Princess Metternich and Walewski.
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| December 16, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 177 |
Wagner tells Otto Wesendonck that he has nearly recovered from six weeks' illness, has yet to finish the new Venus scene and first dance scene of Tannhäuser, and still counts on a premiere in late January with the support of Princess Metternich and Walewski.
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| December 20, 1860* | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 877 |
A birthday letter written on his last sheet of lilac paper: Wagner wishes Mathilde rest, the highest good, and confesses that fame and profit leave him cold, that he now holds his later works to be practically unperformable, and that only art's immediacy rouses him at the Tannhäuser rehearsals. What pains him most is that even his closest friends misread him; his only solace is the one soul that wholly understood him, in whose kindly thought he finds repose, which he lays at her feet as his gift.
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| December 23, 1860 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 461 |
Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck that fame and gain leave him cold, that his later works seem impossible to perform, that only rehearsal draws him into the Tannhäuser enterprise, and that his one consolation is to rest in her understanding soul.
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| December 30, 1860 | Franz Dingelstedt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 88 |
The Weimar intendant reports the great success of Rienzi at the Weimar court theatre over the Christmas holidays and hopes the "Tribune of Weimar" may herald the "Minnesinger of Paris."
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| January 2, 1861 | Marie Niemann | Richard Wagner | Paris | 60 |
The wife of the tenor Albert Niemann excuses her husband from calling on Wagner, explaining that he has come home exhausted from the evening rehearsal of Tannhäuser and must stay in bed.
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| January 15, 1861* | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 323 |
A laconic note from the last weeks of Tannhäuser rehearsals: having finished his new compositions after a night's vigil, Wagner describes rehearsals morning and evening, hunting-horns that had to be found by personal exertion, a further alteration to the Singers' Contest, and a performance expected between 15 and 20 February.
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| January 18, 1861 | Ernst Benedikt Kietz | Richard Wagner | Epernay | 1,140 |
A plaintive New Year's letter from the impoverished Kietz in Épernay, hurt that Wagner has passed through without stopping and has long left his letters unanswered. Feeling himself a ruin vegetating among ruins, he begs for the renewal of their old friendship and recalls Wagner's visit to the Chandons three years before.
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| January 20, 1861* | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 124 |
Wagner tells Otto Wesendonck that he has finished the new Tannhäuser music, must still alter the Song Tournament, and has to see personally to every detail of the rehearsals, down to procuring the horns for the hunting music.
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| January 22, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Ernst Benedikt Kietz | Paris | 99 |
A prompt but curt reply amid the rehearsals for the Paris Tannhäuser: Wagner explains that he travelled by way of Cologne, not Épernay, and offers to pay Kietz's fare to the first performance.
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| January 30, 1861 | Princess Pauline Metternich | Richard Wagner | Paris | 56 |
Princess Metternich, whose influence had secured the Paris production, asks Wagner how the Tannhäuser rehearsals are going and reserves two more orchestra seats.
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| January 31, 1861 | Anton Pusinelli | Minna Wagner | Dresden | 844 |
Relieved that the Dresden rumours of Wagner's brain fever and derangement were exaggerated, Pusinelli prescribes pills and a bitter tea for Minna's palpitations and sleeplessness and warns her against opium. He predicts a decisive Paris triumph for Tannhäuser, reports that Wagner's operas rule the Dresden repertory, now ranks Lohengrin above the rest, and shares news of his eight children.
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| February 8, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Otto Wesendonck | Paris | 318 |
Wagner announces that the first Paris Tannhäuser is fixed for 22 February, assures Wesendonck there will be performances enough in spring if he would rather avoid a winter journey, gratefully defers his generous offer of help, and says a night's unbroken sleep has become an ideal happiness.
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| February 12, 1861* | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 1,521 |
On Shrove Tuesday, in the thick of the Tannhäuser rehearsals, Wagner contrasts Mathilde's calm enjoyment of art with his own toil, professing a deep resignation and indifference in all his relations. He sketches his Paris acquaintances, among them Blandine Ollivier, Malwida von Meysenbug and Countess Kalergis, with whom he sang Act II of Tristan alongside Pauline Viardot, and wives of the Prussian and Saxon ambassadors. He accepts her decision not to attend the première, yet confesses he would count an hour's sight of her thrice-blest, and praises Niemann as "right-down sublime."
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| February 12, 1861* | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 2,115 |
On Shrove Tuesday, Wagner describes his deep resignation and indifference amid the Tannhäuser rehearsals, then sketches the Paris women of his acquaintance: Blandine Ollivier, Malwida von Meysenbug, Countess Kalergis, Princess Metternich, Mme de Pourtalès and Frau von Seebach. He is pained that Mathilde will not attend the premiere, though longing to see her, and praises Niemann as sublime.
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| February 12, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 521 |
Wagner describes to Mathilde Wesendonck the women he has met in Paris—Madame Ollivier, Malwida von Meysenbug, the Countess Kalergis, Frau von Pourtalès and Frau von Seebach—and reports that the Tannhäuser rehearsals are remarkable and Niemann sublime.
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| February 20, 1861 | Albert Niemann | Richard Wagner | Paris | 180 |
Smarting from embarrassment at the first full rehearsal, the tenor Niemann demands that Wagner cut the taxing phrase "venant en aide au misérable" in Act II of Tannhäuser, or else find another Tannhäuser.
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| February 20, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Albert Niemann | Paris | 268 |
From Wagner's long letter of guidance to Niemann after the first full rehearsal, urging a ghostlike, toneless delivery in the third act of Tannhäuser, and the postscript he added on receiving Niemann's ultimatum, in which he sadly agrees to cut the disputed passage.
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| February 21, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Albert Niemann | Paris | 3,092 |
On the eve of the Paris Tannhäuser, Wagner reproaches Niemann for his distrust and for planning to abandon the role, and urges him to sing the restored adagio in the Act II finale with full force, since the drama's crisis lies there rather than in Act III, which he finds too vigorously sung. A postscript, written after an offended letter from Niemann, agrees to cut the passage.
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| February 21, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Albert Niemann | Paris | 1,468 |
On the eve of the Paris Tannhäuser, Wagner reproaches Albert Niemann for his distrust and discouragement, urges him to throw everything into the second-act finale and to sing Act III with ghostly restraint, and finally, after receiving his angry letter, agrees to cut the disputed passage.
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| February 25, 1861 | Director of the Théâtre Impérial de l'Opéra | Richard Wagner | Paris | 50 |
The Opéra management regrets that no box seats are left, sends Wagner an orchestra seat, and assures him that the director's box is always open to him.
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| February 25, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Alphonse Royer | Paris | 406 |
Unwilling to abandon months of work to the incompetent conductor Dietsch, Wagner demands of the director of the Opéra that he himself be allowed to conduct the final rehearsal and the first three performances of Tannhäuser, warning that otherwise the performance cannot go ahead.
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| March 14, 1861 | Eugène Cormon | Richard Wagner | Paris | 93 |
The stage director of the Opéra informs Wagner that Niemann's indisposition forces a change in the next day's Tannhäuser performance, and asks him to meet Boyer, Vauthrot and Dietsch with the score to settle any changes.
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| March 23, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Joseph Tichatschek | Paris | 134 |
On the eve of the third and last Paris Tannhäuser, Wagner recalls with tears how Tichatschek once forbade any cuts in Rienzi as "too heavenly," contrasting him with the coward Niemann.
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| March 23, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Joseph Tichatschek | Paris | 106 |
Contrasting Tichatschek's refusal to allow cuts in Rienzi ('it's too divine!') with Niemann's whining that Tannhäuser is ruining his voice, Wagner tells his old Dresden tenor how often he has thought of him lately.
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| March 30, 1861 | Hans von Bülow | Richard Wagner | Berlin | 1,199 |
After the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, Bülow sympathizes with Wagner and Minna and reports on his week at Karlsruhe, where the Grand Duke has agreed to a festival performance of Tristan under Wagner's direction. He describes playing Tristan to the Grand Duchess, staging part of Rheingold for her with the singer Hauser, and urges Wagner to go straight to Karlsruhe to win the court in person.
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| March 31, 1861* | Richard Wagner | Luise Brockhaus | Paris | 312 |
Sending his account of the Paris Tannhäuser for Fritz Brockhaus, Wagner tells his sister Luise that his chief grief was the poor conducting, that he bears the frivolous Parisians no grudge, and that he wonders why no German patron offers him a haven.
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| April 1, 1861* | Richard Wagner | Charles Baudelaire | Paris | 740 |
After the Jockey Club's disruption of Tannhäuser, Wagner thanks Baudelaire and the young Parisians who rallied to him, reports that he earned only 700 francs for his pains while being accused of costing the Opéra 300,000, and meditates effusively on youth, beauty, love and friendship.
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| April 4, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Hans von Bülow | Paris | 314 |
Wagner sends Bülow concern for Cosima's health, says the Paris Tannhäuser scandal hardly touched him, reports that hopes of St. Petersburg and Berlin have come to nothing, and thanks him warmly for the Karlsruhe scheme.
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| April 6, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 776 |
After the Tannhäuser fiasco at the Paris Opéra, Wagner tells Mathilde that the disaster itself left him fairly indifferent, since the production had already grown alien to him; what stung was the realisation that his whole lot should depend on such mad odds as a Parisian success. Weary of burdening his friends, and hearing of Bülow's efforts on his behalf in Germany, he insists that his star began its descent when he left the Asyl, thanks Otto for standing by him, and announces a brief trip to Karlsruhe.
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| April 6, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Paris | 126 |
Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck that the Paris fiasco itself leaves him indifferent but that he is weary of being a burden to his friends, and has little faith in the German prospect Bülow is trying to secure for him.
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| April 18, 1861 | Franz Liszt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 256 |
Liszt hopes to reach Paris in early May, after painful circumstances prevented a February visit, and asks Wagner's consent to Brendel's proposal to perform the second act of Tristan, with the Schnorrs, at the August meeting of musicians in Weimar.
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| April 19, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | Karlsruhe | 246 |
Wagner praises Karlsruhe's water, butter, cheery people and cheapness, but finds the Grand Duke has gone woodcock-shooting, so he must wait and meanwhile come to an understanding with Devrient. He reports a sleepless journey, the arrival of the kindly Kalliwoda, and expects to return to Paris about Monday or Tuesday.
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| April 20, 1861 | Freiherr von Reischach | Richard Wagner | Karlsruhe | 28 |
The grand-ducal master of ceremonies at Karlsruhe notifies Wagner that the Grand Duke of Baden will receive him on Sunday.
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| April 26, 1861 | Franz Liszt | Richard Wagner | Weimar | 308 |
Liszt accepts that a fragmentary Tristan must seem absurd to Wagner and confides that Weimar's refusal, on grounds of expense, to invite Wagner to produce Tristan and the Ring was his chief reason for leaving the theatre. He rejoices at the planned Carlsruhe Tristan and will see Wagner in Paris.
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| May 1, 1861 | Hans von Bülow | Richard Wagner | Berlin | 912 |
Back from concert-giving, Bülow brings news that Brunswick will open its new theatre with Tannhäuser and that the Dutchman may go to Stuttgart. He asks about Wagner's reception at Karlsruhe, denounces Devrient's anonymous statement that Tristan cannot be produced, and hopes that Liszt's coming visit to Paris will bring the two men the meeting he has long desired, begging Wagner to give the disheartened Liszt a word of encouragement.
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| May 3, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Hans von Bülow | Paris | 466 |
Wagner tells Bülow of his cordial reception by the Grand Ducal pair at Karlsruhe and his skilful reconciliation with Devrient, which has fixed Tristan for September, and of his need to go to Vienna to hear Ander and Dustmann.
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| May 10, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | Vienna | 321 |
Arriving in Vienna to hear Lohengrin for the first time, Wagner tells Minna of his reverent reception, the rehearsal schedule, his cordial audience with the Grand Duke and Duchess at Karlsruhe, his plan to rent an apartment there, and his first impression of Frau Dustmann.
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| May 11, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Vienna | 87 |
Fresh from a rehearsal of Lohengrin in Vienna, the first time he has heard the work, Wagner shares with Mathilde its incredibly moving effect after twelve years of exile, and wishes the Wesendoncks could be there the next day.
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| May 11, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Mathilde Wesendonck | Vienna | 86 |
Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck of the overwhelming effect of hearing Lohengrin for the first time, at a Vienna rehearsal, after twelve years of waiting.
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| May 13, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | Vienna | 776 |
Wagner describes the Vienna rehearsal of Lohengrin, the first time he has heard the work, as the purest joy of his artistic life: he sat motionless in tears while orchestra, singers and chorus excelled, and he warmly thanked Kapellmeister Esser. He extols the tenor Ander and Frau Dustmann as ideal for Tristan and Isolde, reports Count Lanckoronski's offer of the theatre for all his operas, wonders whether to abandon the laborious Karlsruhe model performance while keeping Karlsruhe as a residence, and mentions Tausig and Cornelius.
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| May 13, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | Vienna | 884 |
After hearing the dress rehearsal of Lohengrin in Vienna, the first time he had heard the work, Wagner tells Minna it was the most complete joy of his artistic life, praising Esser, Ander and Dustmann as ideal for Tristan. The intendant has placed the Court Opera at his disposal, so that Vienna now seems a better place for Tristan than Karlsruhe.
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| May 13, 1861 | Richard Wagner | Minna Wagner | Vienna | 456 |
Wagner tells Minna of his tearful emotion at the Vienna Lohengrin rehearsal, praises the superb Vienna company, especially Ander and Dustmann as a future Tristan and Isolde, and reports Count Lanckoronski's offer of the Imperial Opera for all his works.
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