Your esteemed letter has given me great pleasure; less, indeed, on account of the approaching success of our negotiations than because our affairs can be handled with so much sympathy on your part.
Upon one important point, however, I promise particularly to assist you, and that is in regard to the pianoforte arrangement without words. Formerly, in the case of Lohengrin, you really misunderstood me; I wished that you had shown me the arrangement previously in order that I might be able to judge whether it could not be made more practical. What depressed me was that this had not been done, and that recitative phrases and the like had been included which could have neither meaning nor interest for the pianist. I, on the contrary, had conceived the notion of a kind of arrangement dexterously comprising the actual melodic complex of the individual scenes and passing over rhetorical phrases, forming a fluent musical piece out of every scene, very much in the way in which I myself should have moulded the melodic content if I had not intended it for dramatic treatment, but simply for itself symphonically, as it were. Accordingly it cannot but interest me to tell some able pianoforte composer, of whom I know several who would be very willing to take the matter up, my intentions as indicated above, and in this way to provide you with so-called pianoforte arrangements without words which would differ most advantageously from the usual work of the kind. I undertake the task herewith and will see that you get these arrangements at the proper time.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 309