Sorry as I am that you had, in the end, many an unpleasant experience to go through in St. Gall, I am yet on the whole satisfied that you have had experiences. It would, of course, have been a mistake to remain longer under conditions of that kind. Therefore I am glad that you recognise, besides unpleasant memories, certain good effects upon yourself, particularly that you have learned to feel the seriousness of art, even though by indirect means as opposed to direct practical experience. I hope your people will see the good you have acquired and will continue to support you while you need it. Consequently I am also very glad about your reconciliation with your mother.
I am always wishing you would go to Weimar. Do you know that Chelard has been pensioned off and that Liszt is accordingly sole kapellmeister? I had to write to Liszt about his prospects for the Goethe Foundation and did so in a very full letter, which I am inclined to think he will have printed. In this letter I insist particularly on the foundation of an original theatre, in the fullest sense of the word, and suggest Weimar as a favourable situation for it. Have no qualms about a contingent lack of poetic facility. You are a full-blown musician and probably have just sufficient poetic gift to become the right sort of musician I have in mind. Karl's poetic abilities predominate; he has still to show me clearly a corresponding musical capacity.
You will probably go on turning Tristan over in your mind. Why not overtures to the Oresteia? I think it would be better in any case for you to write a special overture to each piece in the trilogy, to Agamemnon, The Choephori and Eumenides. Each of these would gain immeasurably in definition, since the situation could be much more clearly modelled than it could be for the whole trilogy at once. You would then get certain motives important enough, pliant and plastic enough, to be introduced into all three overtures and thereby achieve in these three pieces the only kind of symphony still possible, a symphony elucidating the full content of a pre-existing and most exalted work of poetry. The second movement of this symphony, the overture to The Choephori, would, in spite of the violent catastrophe of the close, be essentially an adagio in character, the whole range of sorrow and lamentation, etc. My next opera is now bespoken in Weimar for a considerable sum. I am applying myself to the work now, but I have very much enlarged my scheme. Siegfried's Death is, for the present, unproducible and incomprehensible by the public. Therefore I am preparing the way with a Young Siegfried.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 202