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.

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Showing all years in May (299 total)

Date	From	To	Place	Words	Subject
May 31, 1858	Richard Wagner	Hans von Bülow	Zurich	427	Wagner asks Bülow to consider honestly whether arranging Tristan would rob him of time for his own creative work, suggesting that young Tausig could do it under his eye, and begs him not to suspect unworthy motives.
May 1, 1859	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Lucerne	20	An anxious telegram from Lucerne demanding to know why Minna has not written.
May 2, 1859	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Lucerne	1,628	Relieved by Minna's telegram, Wagner describes his solitude at Lucerne under fog, rejoices that Liszt's Dante Symphony promises paradise after the purgatorial year, weighs a lucrative three-month offer from New York, plans a sociable evening circle in Paris, and comments sardonically on the outbreak of war.
May 8, 1859	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Lucerne	1,602	Lonely and unable to work, Wagner fears he may break down before finishing Tristan, ironically laments that the German Confederacy is driving him to Paris, and mentions an American offer. Overwhelmed by the Dante dedication, he calls himself an absolute blunderer as a musician beside Liszt, recounts how his published letter on Liszt was misread, and describes caring tenderly for Minna.
May 8, 1859	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Lucerne	1,487	Isolated in Lucerne and unable to work on Tristan's last act, Wagner tells Liszt he feels left in the lurch and fears it may soon be 'too late'. He mocks the German Confederation for driving him towards Paris, weighs an American offer, protests that he is a musical bungler beside Liszt, thanks him for the Dante Symphony, and reports that Minna's health is improving.
May 8, 1859	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Lucerne	967	With bitter irony about the German Confederacy driving him to Paris, Wagner tells Liszt that an American engagement might endanger Tristan, protests that beside Liszt's Dante he feels a musical bungler, and reports that he now pampers Minna like a honeymoon bride.
May 9, 1859*	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Lucerne	664	After a week stuck on the transition in Tristan Act III from "vor Sehnsucht nicht zu sterben" to the sick man's voyage, and a black day in which he told Liszt his composing was finished, Wagner credits Mathilde's gift of Zürich Zwieback with getting him over the passage in a wonderful concord of two themes. He laughs over Schiller's letters, scorns the political obsessions of the day, and mentions writing to Frau Ritter.
May 12, 1859	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Lucerne	1,947	Wagner scolds Minna for her slow reply and complains that persistent bad weather is spoiling the Swiss cure for his ailments and his work, while Liszt and the Germans leave him in the lurch. He resolves to accept the American offer, dreams of a German opera season in Paris to shame his compatriots, plans to spend his birthday on the Rigi, and lovingly describes a country ramble among farm animals and cowbells, before teasing her with a barber anecdote and a postscript on their quarter-century together.
May 12, 1859	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Lucerne	410	Wagner describes to Minna an idyllic country ramble near Lucerne—a mill, its animals, cowbells in the meadows—and dreams of winters in Paris and homely Swiss summers, perhaps at Brunnen, if America will pay for it.
May 14, 1859	Franz Liszt	Richard Wagner	Weimar	486	Liszt answers Wagner's stormy letter with unshaken confidence, calling his self-reproach as a 'miserable musician' a sign of greatness and urging resignation and patience in Christ. He doubts the American plan, advises relying on Carlsruhe, where Tristan is expected in December, and is going to Leipzig for the musicians' meeting.
May 15, 1859	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Lucerne	247	Wagner warmly recommends the trombonist Thiele of Berne, a hero of his 1853 Zurich concerts, for the vacant post in the Weimar orchestra, and reports that he has asked Devrient not to count on Tristan any longer.
May 18, 1859	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Lucerne	2,774	Responding to Minna's repeated grievance over the passage on their marriage in his Communication to my Friends, Wagner distinguishes fleeting being-in-love from the mature love that grows between spouses, insists he never meant to accuse her, and recalls Hermann Brockhaus's verdict on her flight in 1837. He then scripts at length the answer she might give to gossips, frankly rehearsing her early desertion, his forgiveness and their later trials, and begs her to stop tormenting herself over the past.
May 18, 1859	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Lucerne	1,894	Answering Minna's complaints about the passage on their marriage in his Communication to my Friends, Wagner explains its purpose and dictates the answer she might give to gossips: an honest account of their youthful marriage, her flight in 1837, their reconciliation and the trials of later life.
May 21, 1859	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Lucerne	49	Feeling miserable, Wagner asks Liszt to send him Tausig, who is said to be free and willing to come.
May 21, 1859	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Lucerne	435	Wagner reports the "comical discovery" that his trouble with Tristan is largely hypochondria: a passage he thought must be recast proved, once fair-copied unchanged, too good to improve. He traces his mistrust of his sketches to having shown them too freely to unsympathetic outsiders, writes on the Schweizerhof's coquettish pink paper, and makes Mathilde a present of his approaching birthday.
May 21, 1859	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Lucerne	204	Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck of his amusing discovery that his anguish over the third act of Tristan is mere hypochondria, since a passage he despaired of proves on fair copying to be as good as he could make it.
May 23, 1859	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Lucerne	1,081	Praising Mathilde's war-song, Wagner tells the curious tale of how, on the train back to Lucerne, he had mentally preferred the Soldier's Song in Beethoven's Egmont music to "Freudvoll und leidvoll," only to find her song built on that very melody. He thanks her for birthday wishes, worries over Karl Ritter's silence, describes his aimless life of Kissingen water, unanswered publishers and leaving all to chance, mentions a new idea for Parzival and dipping into Plato, and calls himself so peaceable he no longer wages war even with himself.
May 23, 1859	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Lucerne	640	Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck of birthday greetings from Liszt, of Julie Ritter's revealing remark about Karl's hasty marriage, of his fatalistic day-to-day life in Lucerne with Goethe's Egmont for comfort, and of a new discovery regarding Parzival.
May 26, 1859	Richard Wagner	Otto Wesendonck	Lucerne	339	Delighted by the unexpected arrival of his box from Venice with the musical sketches he had half given up for lost, Wagner remarks that Germany has no time for his works amid the war in Italy, values his projected American alliance, jokes about his mineral-water cure, and looks forward to the Wesendoncks' visit to Lucerne at Pentecost.
May 26, 1859	Richard Wagner	Otto Wesendonck	Lucerne	79	Wagner tells Otto Wesendonck that his long-awaited box has arrived from Venice, its sketches, given up for lost, coming to him like a new gift and confirming that all pleasure is merely negative.
May 29, 1859	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Lucerne	2,500	In this celebrated letter Wagner first sets out his understanding of the Parsifal material. After musings on patience, Goethe's "freudvoll und leidvoll," and news from Karl Ritter in Rome, he recommends early-morning walks to Mathilde and describes the "veritable ague" of Tristan's third act. He then explains that Anfortas, condemned by the Grail's sight to undying torment from a wound like the Saviour's, is "my Tristan of the third act with an inconceivable increase." He denounces Wolfram von Eschenbach's treatment of the legend as shallow, extols the Grail as the cup of the Last Supper, the most pregnant symbol ever devised for a religion's spiritual core, outlines the dramatic problem of Parzival's development, and half-jokingly renounces the project altogether.
May 29, 1859	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Lucerne	1,090	Reporting on the third act of Tristan, a regular intermittent fever, Wagner explains to Mathilde Wesendonck why he now recoils from Parzival: Amfortas, an intensified Tristan of Act III, would be its true centre, Wolfram's poem is crude, and everything would have to be invented anew.
May 30, 1859	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Lucerne	1,036	Wagner is aghast that Minna let the Sch. treat her to cheap Lössnitz champagne on his birthday and blames the drink and the friend for her taking offence at his last letter about the Preface passage. He protests he meant no insult, swears on his honour that the old rumour of his second Bordeaux journey being an attempt to abduct a young wife is a shameless lie, and pleads that he is conscious of no bad actions.
May 30, 1859	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Lucerne	1,712	Composing Tristan's last act, which swings between unprecedented suffering and triumph, Wagner explains why he has turned against Parzival: Amfortas, kept alive and tormented by the Grail, would be Tristan's third act inconceivably intensified. He criticizes Wolfram's confused treatment, praises the Christian symbolism of the Grail chalice, and declares he will leave the subject to others.
May 30, 1859	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Lucerne	247	Wagner tells Minna he cannot understand how his letter insulted her, and swears on his honour that the rumour she has kept secret—that he returned to Bordeaux to abduct a young wife—is a shameless calumny.
May 31, 1859	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Lucerne	2,541	Still fuming over the Lössnitz champagne, Wagner insists his letter on the Preface passage was a panegyric on Minna, begs her to stop raking up the past, and rails at the Sch. and meddling old maids. He thanks her for an embroidered blotting-book, confesses his dislike of her old bead-work, and reports the safe arrival of his Siegfried sketches from Venice, his Kissinger cure and a lanced abscess, gossip about Kietz, Paris as the likely future, and his friendship with a pug-dog.
May 2, 1860	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Paris	1,257	Moved by Mathilde's recollections, Wagner reflects that the noble life consists in resistance and negation, and that the artist's inspiration blossoms "like a flower of despair." He sets out the choice before him: either to devote his remaining strength to performing his finished works, shouldering all the consequences of affirming life, or to renounce hearing them and, in total poverty, sheltered by a family, write the works still in his head. He concludes that disclosing his completed works through perfect performances matters more to the World-spirit, and resolves to bear all.
May 10, 1860	Richard Wagner	Eduard Avenarius	Paris	588	Wagner asks Eduard Avenarius to find a literary publisher, ideally Cotta, for the complete Ring poem as a book distinct from Schott's musical editions, and reports promising negotiations with Dresden and the ordering of Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra.
May 20, 1860	Richard Wagner	Malwida von Meysenbug	Paris	739	Wagner asks Malwida von Meysenbug to tell Madame S. that he cannot yet repay her loan towards his concert losses, explains why he could accept a loan but never a collection made as a present, and says that if Fate ever freed him to follow his own fancy he would choose total poverty and retreat.
May 20, 1860	Richard Wagner	Malwida von Meysenbug	Paris	213	Wagner asks Malwida von Meysenbug to tell Madame Szemere he cannot yet repay her loan, and to keep up the appearance that he knew nothing of the proposed collection to cover his concert losses, which he could never have encouraged.
May 22, 1860	Franz Liszt	Richard Wagner	Weimar	24	Liszt telegraphs cordial birthday wishes to Wagner in Paris.
May 22, 1860	Richard Wagner	Agnes Street-Klindworth	Paris	112	Awaiting news of his amnesty through Seebach, Wagner hopes to produce Tristan in Vienna or Dresden before the Paris Tannhäuser rehearsals, failing which a trip to Switzerland will be his only relaxation.
May 22, 1860*	Richard Wagner	Franz Liszt	Paris	360	Moved by Berlioz's article on Fidelio, Wagner tells Liszt that, despite Berlioz's estrangement under a bad wife's influence, he has written to him, for only men of high talent—Liszt, Berlioz and himself—have anything in common.
May 23, 1860	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Paris	1,674	The morning after his forty-seventh birthday, moved to tears by the portraits of Mathilde and Otto she sent from Rome, Wagner describes the radiant day before: a clear sky that made him feel the gods loved him, a conciliatory note of thanks he sent Berlioz for an article on Fidelio, his painful estrangement from Liszt because of Princess Wittgenstein's intrusion into their letters, and Jupiter shining at evening. He tells the story of the Brussels photograph he means to send her, the best of his portraits, unlike the Paris one that makes him look "like a sentimental Marat."
May 23, 1860	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Paris	193	Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck that he still finds Liszt wholly lovable but has stopped writing to him because their intimacies are always exposed to the Princess, under whose influence Liszt has become a man without secrets.
May 31, 1860	Franz Liszt	Richard Wagner	Weimar	646	Liszt longs to be in Paris with Wagner's Ring and Tristan, describes the room where Wagner's bust stands alone beside a picture of St. Francis, and announces that the Princess's great life-question has been favourably settled in Rome. He advises patience during the Paris Tannhäuser rehearsals and, against Devrient's verdict, offers to stage Tristan at Weimar in 1861.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
May 16, 1861	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Vienna	699	Exhausted by callers, Wagner describes the unprecedented ovation at the Vienna Lohengrin: repeated bows from his box, curtain calls after every act, a speech at the end, and a director pale with astonishment; he means to hear the Flying Dutchman in hiding. He wishes Minna had been there, urges her to ignore a fresh Paris annoyance involving X, holds to the plan of settling at Karlsruhe, sends greetings to Liszt and the Laubes, and lists the banquets and serenades planned in his honour.
May 16, 1861	Richard Wagner	Stürmer	Vienna	218	The day after hearing Lohengrin for the first time, in Vienna, Wagner shares his joy with his Zurich benefactor Stürmer: an overwhelming performance and ovations such as no composer there had known, which leave him, after so much ill treatment, deeply reconciled.
May 18, 1861	Richard Wagner	Akademischer Gesangverein, Vienna	Vienna	369	Declining a serenade planned by the Vienna Academic Choral Society after his first hearing of Lohengrin, Wagner explains that the joy of that evening, such as an artist may know once in his life, should be kept inviolate, and asks to leave Vienna quietly entranced. Published in the Wiener Presse; Minna's copy carries her note that he was wrong to refuse.
May 20, 1861	Richard Wagner	Minna Wagner	Vienna	328	Scribbling amid visitors, Wagner reports a superb Vienna performance of Der fliegende Holländer and the same enthusiastic demonstrations as at Lohengrin, with Princes and Counts applauding. He has declined a Tannhäuser performance and probably a fête from Strauss, announces that Tristan is to be given in Vienna on 1 October with his return there on 15 August, and expects to be back with Minna within a week after a stop at Karlsruhe.
May 27, 1861	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Paris	316	Back in Paris after a brief reunion with the Wesendoncks on his way from Vienna, Wagner finds Mathilde's birthday letter, whose effect is the more beautiful for the Wiedersehen that lay between. He reports the Grand Duke of Baden's delight at his resolve to settle in Karlsruhe, mentions Liszt and Tausig in Paris, faces a "bad, a difficult period," and thanks her for her presents.
May 27, 1861	Richard Wagner	Mathilde Wesendonck	Paris	130	Wagner tells Mathilde Wesendonck that the Grand Duke of Baden welcomes his choice of Karlsruhe, that Liszt is visiting him in Paris, and that young Tausig cheers him up.
No letters found.

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