Excerpt from Family Letters of Richard Translated

Somewhere I have recently seen this collection of "Family Letters" referred to by a well-wishing journalist in advance of its integral English publication - a few of the letters or portions thereof having been elsewhere translated by me before - as "a supplement to Wagner's Autobiography." Upon the assumption that we yet may be given a reliable translation of Mein Leben, to some extent I can accept that description, as all the intimate expressions of a great man's personality may be said to supplement each other in a sense. But the true counterpart of these letters of Richard Wagner's to his blood-relatives and connections is to be found, of course, in those to his first wife "Minna, " at the end of my preface to which I breathed the hope, now more than two years since, that they might "soon be supplemented by an English rendering of the delightful Familienbriefe", and in fact it is by the barest chance that the latter rendering did not then take first place, as was my own desire when the two collections made almost simultaneous appearance in their original vernacular, winter 1907-8.

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