Richard WAGNER: Autographed Letter & Envelope, Signed (to August Röckel)

Description

Richard WAGNER: Autographed Letter & Envelope, Signed (to August Röckel) dated 19. July, 1862
8vo size letter hand written on hotel sationary from Mainz by RW to August Röckel
staying with a family in Frankfurt am Main.
The letter is in mint condition (only folded by Wagner himself). The envelope is in good condition (with the stamp cut out).
Translation is included.
Summary:
RW refuses R
öckel's request for money as he himself has borrowed funds for his vacation and is regretful of the entire situation.
Röckel, a composer and conductor, was the son of the famous tenor Josef August
Röckel
(a close friend of Beethoven's and the first to sing Florestan in Fidelio). He was also the nephew of Elisabeth R
öckel (Mrs. Johann Nepomuk Hummel) whom some musicologists feel was the object of Beethoven's F
ür Elise.
Röckel, along with Wagner and the revolutionary Michael Bakunin were all complicit in the 1848 Uprising in Dresden, Saxony. Both
Röckel and Bakunin were sentenced to death, with terms later commuted to imprisonment. Wagner famously went into exile for two decades.
Röckel had to endure 13 years of solitary confinement at K
önigstein Fortress until 1862. Wagner and
R
öckel
had maintained a correspondence
while
R
öckel
was imprisoned.
The letter is cased in a hand-bound and tooled Moroccan kid leather book further protected by a slip case with hand-marbled paper (both executed by the famous book restorers, the late Fred and Elka Shihadeh). [The tools of the Shihadeh's are now housed in the Sugartown Book Bindery Museum in Malvern, PA
]
Included is the bill of sale (from the last time this letter traded hands), from the famous Philadelphia book antiquarian (now defunct) Charles Sessler's. The late proprietor of Sessler's was Mable Zahn, who was commissioned to purchase this letter in auction in 1973. [Herself a knowledegable musicologist, Miss Zahn is mentioned in the 1921 book: A Magnificent Farce by A. Edward Newton.]
This is an unpublished letter and an important piece of history.