Many thanks for your letter! Your last one from Hanover, with its gift of good news from Hamburg and of rubbish from the Leipzig Lohengrin affair, came the day before Liszt's letter telling me, most kindly and gently, of the disappointment at Leipzig. It is a real joy to see one's noblest and best maltreated and derided, but unfortunately this time a great deal depended on my being spared this pleasure. Liszt has been rather incomprehensible in this affair. He seems to have misunderstood the conditions under which I allowed Leipzig to have Lohengrin, namely that he was to appear as my alter ego and even exercise the right of veto. But that is just the unfortunate thing about him, that he will only very occasionally let it come to an out-and-out quarrel with anyone, even when a fight is inevitable. In any case he interpreted the conditions very amply on his part, perhaps because he saw that the Leipzig people did not at all want to take the matter up. Why did he not drop the whole thing at once, then? Did he think the Leipzig performance absolutely necessary, even if it were a foredoomed failure? A funny sort of policy! But I have it! I am obliged to see that he made no use at all of my conditions, for he advised Rietz to write about the adjustment of certain tempi which the latter had pulled so badly that it usually led to complete breakdown. Accordingly, either Liszt was never at a rehearsal, or he was too weak to raise a single protest. What a pity it is! Oh, if I had only kept to the determination I formed two years ago, not to let my operas be performed anywhere yet! Accursed inconstancy! The Rhinegold is finished, written especially for Leipzig.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 253