Your Excellency will permit me to advance a most humble petition. The matter touches the platform of the old Opera House, which is so constructed as to contravene all rules for the arrangement of an oratorio or symphony orchestra, and probably has no counterpart anywhere else in the world. Its deficiencies scarcely need enumeration, for it must leap to the eye of any observer that an orchestra only two rows deep, arranged in a semicircle fifty-six feet in diameter, can only keep exact time with the greatest difficulty and by the exercise of constant anxious care, while it is utterly impossible for it to produce the beautiful and forceful results otherwise to be expected from so well-equipped a body.
I hold that a request for help of this kind ought to be accompanied by a plan elaborated sufficiently for the scope of the proposal to be easily apparent, and so, with the kind assistance of Herr Hanel, mechanical engineer, I have drawn up my scheme for the accommodation of the oratorio and symphony orchestra in a manner adapted to the conditions of the old Opera House and enclose it herewith for Your Excellency's kind consideration.
Lipinski, too, is quite at one with me in this, and I do not doubt that my colleague Reissiger, before whom I would beg Your Excellency to lay this plan, will have no serious objection to make, since he was entirely of the same mind when we last touched upon this matter in the course of conversation.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 121