Here I sit again gazing after you. My best thanks to your dear Princess for the first news. My mind was set at rest not a little on hearing that you had been able to continue your journey to Munich without mishap. There you will be able to rest a little more comfortably than at the Hecht of St. Gallen. Rest? Ye indefatigable ones! A thousand ardent blessings follow you everywhere. What you have become to me your hearts will tell you. You are so rich a possession to me that I scarcely know how to realise it. But on the other hand, you are to me a continual sermon of repentance; I cannot think of you without being heartily ashamed of myself. How can you bear with me, who appear so unbearable to myself? But I am not without good resolutions of amendment. Although I shall palm off great part of the care on my doctor, who is to put me completely on my legs again next spring, I am too well aware that an enormous labour - less watercure than purgatory - lies before me. Yes, I will shut myself up in that Purgatorio, and hope, dearest Franz, that I shall do so well that I may greet you with a MAGNIFICAT soon. It is true that I shall never be able to equal you, but then you are the only genuine virtuoso. My aesthetic efforts will, I hope, cure my moral prostration to some extent. I must try tomorrow to break the news of the death of his mother to "Siegfried."
On Thursday evening I arrived at the Zeltweg, freezing and empty, with a violent cold and in terrible weather; since then I have not set foot out of doors. All I did was to find a good place for the Madonna and Francesca, which was a difficult job. I hammered like Mime. Now all is safe and sound. The Madonna hangs over my writing table and Francesca over the sofa, under the looking-glass, where she looks beautiful. When I begin Tristan Francesca will have to go over the writing table, and the turn of the Madonna will not come again until I take the Victors in hand. For the present I will try to inspire myself a little with the victrix, and to imagine that I could do the same thing. My studs are much finer than yours, dear Child; that any one can see. Yours have the sole advantage of moving one to resignation, while mine excite my vanity terribly - a kind of surreptitious vanity, not before the eyes of people, but all to myself; merely for the sake of the studs, not for effect. It is just the same with my Nibelungen. You always think of the effect of the performance, I of the shirt studs that may be hidden in it. Well, my blessings on you. If only the dear "lady friend" would soon recover her health, so that the great professors of Munich might delight in the "Rectory family"! Dear, good Princess, and dear, dear Franz, MON BON GRAND! Good and great you are. My blessings on you! If only the dear "lady friend" would soon recover her health, so that the great professors of Munich might delight in the "Rectory family"!
Richard Wagner
Source: Project Gutenberg eBook #4234, Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt — Volume 2, No. 227