me cater for you I could arrange matters very cheaply.  At the “Hotel (Pension) Baur au lac,” where you stayed before, one can, during the winter, have brilliant, large, and comfortable rooms for very little.  A family of my acquaintance occupied a whole floor there last winter, and lived very well at a fabulously cheap rate.  The Wesendoncks are also staying there, and you might set up a splendid, half-common MENAGE, which would be a great joke.  Well, the chief thing will be to have a good piano for our two selves, and of that I will take care, although I cannot provide so splendid an instrument as that which Erard sent me in London, and for which I forgot to thank you.  I believe if I had such an instrument I should still learn to play the piano.

I am much annoyed about Hanover.  I know of no way to address a reclamation to the King.  I have no faith in Wehner’s intercession.  As a subordinate of Count P.’s, he can risk no step which might compromise him with that official.  But these are disgusting things to write about.  You also complain of troubles.  Tell me, why do not we live together?  Must it be Weimar of all places?  Another time more about this.  For today farewell, and let me thank you for being in existence.

Your

R. W.

199.

Dearest Richard,

Over America I had forgotten Hanover, and must not omit once more to point out Wehner to you as the best advocate of your claims there.  If the matter of the honorarium can be arranged according, to your wish, he will be the most likely man to do it.  From Joachim I have heard nothing since the Dusseldorf festival.  Wehner lives at Hanover, and is in particular favour with His Majesty, and he will be most eager to do you a little service if you will ask him in a friendly manner.

At the end of December, about Christmas, I shall be with you.  Then we will feed like the gods on your “Rhinegold” and “Valkyrie,” and I, too, shall contribute some hors d’oeuvre.

F. L.

Weymar, September 23rd, 1855.

Write to me, at the first opportunity, whether ten thousand or twelve thousand dollars, with proper guarantee, would be a sufficient honorarium if you were to act as conductor in America for six months.

200.

October 3rd, 1855.

Today, dearest Franz, I send you the two first acts of the “Valkyrie” finished.  It is a great satisfaction to me to place them at once in your hands, because I know that no one sympathises with my work as you do.  I am anxious for the very weighty second act; it contains two catastrophes, so important and so powerful, that there would be sufficient matter for two acts; but then they are so interdependent, and the one implies the other so immediately, that it was impossible to separate them.  If it is represented exactly as I intend, and if my intentions are perfectly understood, the effect must be beyond