Most honoured friend! Dresden, 29th June 1845. I begin by asking you to rest assured that I am deliberating over the composition of your opera [Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer] purely out of my great interest in the many beautiful and excellent things it contains. I think your music good almost throughout. There are certain portions, such as the introduction to the first act, the whole Eisenhammer scene and so on, which I value more highly than many an entire modern opera or oratorio, for they bear the noblest stamp of Romanticism. With so much which truly enchants me, I am naturally inclined to feel that a work like this should not be withheld from the world and it is only when I fix my mind on the desirability of the actual production of the opera that I begin to wish some things other than they are. Let me be brief. I will first speak of what resides in the subject itself and is rooted in the dramatic construction of the libretto.
We will consider simply how the opera can be altered from its present form so as to make it a more concentrated, that is to say a more effective, music drama, without going very destructively to work. In all these proposals the end I have in view is the possibility of helping your opera to a success upon the boards. First of all, your libretto contains too many characters and too many scenes. I wish you had never known Holbein's incoherent, higgledy-piggledy, insipid version and had had nothing before you but Schiller's ballad, and you would have come far nearer to constructing a sound opera. Listen now, while I tell you my proposal for a complete scenic rearrangement in your libretto, a proposal which I make to you upon mature consideration. It is asking a lot of you to undertake such a great alteration in your work. If you take my advice and undergo this difficult and painful operation I shall be very glad to think I have been able to influence you to it, for I am certain that by this means we shall all be the better of a good and successful piece of operatic work.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 114