Cordial thanks for your New Year's greeting, dearest Richard. I expect to see the explanation of the last words of your telegram in your next letter, for I have no knowledge of the event which you describe as wonderfully miserable. In certain quarters, however, the MISERABLE appears no longer WONDERFUL to me. I hope the new year will bring some things to a better issue, and have many good things in store for you.
Enclosed I send you this week's repertoire of the Weimar theatre, in which you will see the announcement of Lohengrin for next Sunday. For the first time I shall not conduct this work to which I am attached with my whole soul. Tannhäuser also I have left to my colleague, and when I come to explain to you the circumstances which determine me to this negative attitude, I feel sure that you will see in it no neglect of my artistic conviction, much less of my duty as a friend to you.
If your operas have elsewhere been given for the purpose of getting money, the responsibility lies with those concerned; but here, where these works have been guarded and watched with so much love, I cannot make myself an accomplice of the brutal mercantile spirit in which they are now regarded, especially not after we two have been treated with such total want of consideration in this Rienzi affair, which has been allowed to drag on for more than eighteen months.
As I said in my last letter, I fully approve of your resolution not to sell Rienzi to the management here. If you should be applied to by letter I ADVISE YOU TO MAKE NO CONCESSION. If the time for relenting should come I shall send you word; you know how deeply your interests concern me. In the first instance, the Prophet, Bal Masque, Don Pasquale, and Antigone, have to be studied and performed, which will leave no time or goodwill for Rienzi.
As regards goodwill, C. R. can relate to you the circumstances of the first performance of Cornelius's opera, when my passive attitude during this season will be explained to you. Really I often require the patience beseeming a confrater of the Franciscan order to bear so many intolerable things.
Franz Liszt
Source: Project Gutenberg eBook #4234, Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt — Volume 2, No. 279