Accept my best thanks for the friendly readiness you have evinced to negotiate an agreement with me in the difficult matter of an undertaking to publish my Nibelungs. The greatest difficulty, upon the definite solution of which you feel you must insist, consists just in the fact that the terms of the honorarium must be exactly settled forthwith if a contract of sale is to be concluded. I need scarcely tell you how exceptionally difficult my position is in this respect, as the whole case is relatively new and unprecedented.
It is not possible that I should ever again conceive, far less execute, anything like my Nibelung works; it is the completest, ripest work of my life, and I believe that, even in the poem, I have presented the nation with a gift which will be held to have value in the future, as well as in the present. Apart from the advantages which this great work is bound to possess over my earlier ones by virtue of the far greater wealth of experience it contains, there is this to be said for its chance of success at the outset - that it will be introduced to the public for the first time by a performance which will at all events be exceptional. How, then, I ask again, am I to find a standard of measurement for the honorarium for the publication of this undeniably extraordinary work, especially as the success of the first performance can decide nothing, any more than in the case of Lohengrin and Tannhauser? If I had direct heirs and were well-to-do in proportion to my exacting requirements, I would simply propose a per cent contract with you, vested in my heirs, etc. But as things are, this would be sheer self-robbery at a time when I am in the highest degree in need of support and assistance. Accordingly I think the most sensible thing would be for me to look for my standard of measurement in the needs which I have to satisfy.
For years it has been my earnest wish to possess a little plot of cultivated land in the country with a house upon it to satisfy my increasingly urgent need of peace and quiet and especially of retirement from the abominable tinkle of pianos which pursues me everywhere to my increasing torment and which I have tried by every method in vain to avoid. I intend to use the publishing fee for this work for the purchase and equipment of such a plot in the neighbourhood of Zurich, which I shall never permanently leave, even in case of being amnestied, as I believe I shall only be able to finish the work in the favourable environment of such a property. This sum, for all four parts, or the same number of operas, if you choose to call them so, is two thousand louis d'or or ten thousand gold thalers.
Whatever your decision, however, I feel myself compelled by the very definite needs of my situation to state that, should an agreement not be reached which would at once answer to these needs, I should be obliged to give up the completion of this great work as an impossibility. Should this be the case, I have decided to take up another work [Tristan and Isolde] which I could finish in the course of a year and which would furnish me, by means of honorariums from the theatres, with the necessary means for the fulfilment of my express wish. I am more than doubtful whether I should then ever return to the interrupted work, as I am accustomed to work upon one thing at a time, and necessarily lose the right mood for abandoned material, a fact for which there are deep psychological reasons.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 305