I am just on the point of sending the score of my Flying Dutchman back to Berlin where it is to be performed, but I cannot resist the temptation of holding it back a few days to send it first to you. What I chiefly desire is that you should understand my tendency; if you should then wish to write a detailed account of my music, it rests with you. Just as I have wished you at Dresden I have wished myself at Leipzig in order to get to know your music. You could not respond to the wish and neither can I. Then resort to the shift which I have resorted to: send me your music, I will study it with zeal and exactitude and you write a detailed account for any paper you like, if you consider it suitable, perhaps for the Elegante. My good friend, let us hold together. Who knows what good it may lead to, particularly if, as I hope, our artistic tendencies converge. And now for something else: I grieve for this beautiful Dresden with its splendid artistic equipment. It seems such waste to me that it has no vital journalistic outlet. I belong here now.
I am to be kapellmeister with full salary, as Morlacchi was, and enjoy the special privilege of at once becoming kapellmeister in fact, whereas formerly every kapellmeister, even Weber himself, had to serve a year as director of music upon a lower salary. I have recently been in Berlin. Things are at a low ebb there and my conviction is that nothing artistically considerable will ever come to fruition there. There is demoralisation from above - everything is half done. It sickened me. Is Leipzig flourishing? Will the School of Music bear good fruit? It is to be hoped so. Ah, my dear people, learn above all things a little antipathy to music so that such appalling numbers of you will not go in for it!
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 82