Here comes Tristan! I hope he will win your interest! I got through the poem apace, as the subject had long been ripening in my mind. And now I have been at work on the composition for several days; naturally it will be a great strain upon me and I may perhaps have to make a break some time. You shall have early information of the fate of the work. If it is successful, I shall hope at last to see you next year. I am not altogether pleased at having to think about the worries of performance already, and yet it was just the practical nature of the enterprise that decided me to take up the work.
In Siegfried I have got as far as the close of Act II, which has turned out tolerably odd and original but pleases me very much. Well, the Nibelungs are laid aside for a year; I hope that they will not have lost their freshness for me by then, and while Tristan is letting the world hear something of me again, I shall go on forging the great work for which, however, I must first suitably prepare the world before I can present it to the world.
The visit of the young Bülow couple was the best thing that happened to me this summer. They stayed three weeks in our little house in the little nook always ready for you and Emilie. I have seldom been so agreeably and joyously entertained as by this intimate, unceremonious visit. In the mornings they all had to keep quiet while I wrote Tristan, and I read them a new act of it each week. For the remainder of the day there was almost always music, for which Frau Wesendonck regularly came across, so that we had our appreciative little public ready to hand. Bülow’s mastery of his instrument is prodigious; his infallible musical intuition, his incredible memory, and his amazing and peculiar facility, his imperturbability and readiness, did me an amazing amount of good. When you know Cosima I think you will probably agree with me in thinking the young pair most happily endowed. With all their intellect and actual genius there is so much liveliness and buoyancy in these young things that one cannot but feel very happy to be with them. I let them go at last very regretfully, but only on their promising faithfully to come again next year.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 342