experience to you.  I had foreseen this, and made you silent reproaches when D. was called to Weimar through your means.  I quite understood that, owing to prolonged irritation, you were, on receipt of my last letter, in a mood which misled you as to the character of my threat to withdraw “Rienzi.”  You recognized in me also the sympathetic annoyance at all the unworthy things we meet with, and you overlooked the fact that a poor devil like me cannot afford to be serious.  Therefore you entered seriously and bitterly into my withdrawal of “Rienzi,” which, after the insults you had received, was welcome to you, and I, for my part, had to witness on that wretched New Year’s Eve the destruction of my last secret, but none the less certain, hope of receiving money.  The great disappointment of that moment would, at any other time, have probably made me reticent and silent, but the long-expected and ardently-longed-for boon of your sympathy for “Tristan” evoked in me a kind of convulsive excitement.  Once more, your joy at my first act had brought you so near to my innermost heart that I thought I might, at such a moment, make the most outrageous demand on you.  That feeling I expressed, if I remember rightly, in the words, “For my paroxysm of joyous excitement your delight at ‘Tristan’ is responsible.”  Dearest friend, at that moment I could not even think of the possibility of a misunderstanding.  Everything being so certain and infallible between us, I went to the opposite extreme of reproaching you because you had left me in the lurch with regard to money matters, and because you had taken my diplomatic demonstration against D. in a much too earnest and pathetic sense, my only interest in him being comprised in a little money.  I further indicated that the various considerations, which to you, being on the spot, and holding an official position, might appear serious and of great moment, did not exist for me at all, the only connection between myself and the theatres, and their public art, being solely that of money.

That of money!  Yes, so it is; and with that you reproach me.  You should rather pity me.  Do you not think that I should prefer your position in regard to the performance of your own works because money is no object to you?  My first letter of this year will have shown you that I also am capable of considering the matter in a serious and literally pathetic, i.e., suffering mood.

Enough of this.  Your letter, received today, has affected me deeply, as you will easily understand.  Yet I am calm and full of hope.  Your curious misunderstanding in applying my reproach, that you answer me in “too earnest and pathetic a style,” to your delight at “Tristan”, must by this time have become clear to yourself.  I feel quite confident that any unprejudiced friend, to whom you may show our last letters, will persuade you, in spite of your prejudice, that my humorous and playfully extravagant reproach referred only to your idea of my intended withdrawal of “Rienzi,” and, generally speaking, to the expectation I had of D. and the whole slough of our German operatic theatres.  You now know the position which excited me to this kind of desperate humour, and I hope it will be a long time before I again have to change my last napoleon at the telegraph office.