this highly poetical legend contains the most inadequate & pedestrian account to have come down to us, and I feel very fortunate to have satisfied my desire to rescue what by now is an almost unrecognizable legend from the rubble & decay to which the medieval poet has reduced the poem as a result of his inferior & prosaic treatment of it, & to have restored it to its rich & highly poetical potential by dint of my own inventiveness & reworking of it. – But quite apart from all this, how felicitous a libretto it has turned out to be! Effective, attractive, impressive & affecting in all its parts! – Johanna]'s role in it (Albert's daughter – see illustration below) – which is very important & in point of fact the principal role in the work – is bound to turn out the most charming & most moving in the world. Between May and June 1846, Wagner made a through-composed draft for the whole work that consisted of only two staves: one for the voice, the other just indicating the harmonies. Coterminously, Wagner began work on a second draft of the poem, beginning with Act III. The complete draft of Act III was completed before the second draft of Acts I and II. This has sometime led to the erroneous conclusion that the entire work was completed from the end to the front. On 9 September 1846 Wagner began to elaborate the instrumental and choral parts, which, along with the Prelude, was completed on 29 August 1847. Numerous changes to the poem, particularly Act III, took place during work on the second draft. At this time Wagner was still trying to clarify the precise nature of the tragedy, and the extent to which he needed to spell out the mechanics of the tragedy to the audience. On 30 May 1846 Wagner wrote to the journalist regarding the relationship between Lohengrin and Elsa. It is apparent from the letter that Wagner and Franck had been discussing Lohengrin for some time, and Wagner refers back to an earlier argument about the relationship between Lohengrin and Elsa, and in particular whether Elsa's punishment of separation from Lohengrin at the end of the opera is justifiable. Wagner uses the letter firstly to argue in favour of his version and secondly to expand upon the more general mythical structure underpinning the relationship between Lohengrin