No, Minna, it can't be, I can't believe that you have gone from me not to come back again! Oh, that last day! If only on account of the agony of that day, you ought to know what you must do. Like my own shadow I have been wandering about. Nothing matters to me any longer, nothing interests me. My aspirations—the opera—my affairs—they no longer exist for me when you desert me; for you have been the focus of all my striving, all my actions; here I accepted the job only for the sake of possessing you. Dear child, another week like this day and I shall be consumed with grief and sorrow; even on the street I haven't been able to hold back my tears; alas, and your apartment, when I enter it, I am torn with pain. O Minna, you fill me with misery, and you don't even pity me! My heart is broken, everything I'm facing is colorless and void of joy. And the future—what am I to do here—what? If you don't come back to me, and if I find that you have bound yourself in Berlin, I would have to consider it as a breach of our love, and then not even God could keep me here any longer, and I have firmly made up my mind that I would commit an act of despair. Where then? It would make no difference—I would deliberately seek my own ruin, for you cannot possibly love me if you coolly disregard these tears and these entreaties. I'll throw myself into a quite new life with the wish to lose myself in it.
O Minna, my dearest, with all the fervor which the most intense love can command, see me embracing your knees and imploring you in an agony of despair: Return to me, come back! Then a happy and beautiful future will smile on us, but if you do not come my ruin is certain. Oh, come, come! Don't listen to the voice of vanity this time, whether your mother's or that of someone else, listen to the voice of Love! And why must I beseech you to do this? Have I not the right to speak in quite a different tone? I could summon the right of Love, and say: "Minna, return—I offer you herewith, formally and according to custom, my hand and the ring, and you belong to me." And by God, so I will speak now, and to your mother as well—and now listen: Bethmann was upset and wanted to consider the contract as broken, but I succeeded in persuading him to forgive you your unjust trick. He explained to me that Romeo and Juliet had not been cast by him, but by Grabowsky, and even if he himself should assign Juliet to Mme. Grabowsky, since he doesn't consider you quite suitable for that role, you ought in any case to have Gretchen and Lucia; this is the truth. By the way, Der Glöckner is to be restored so that you may retain your full rights. These are his own words as he wished them conveyed to you. And, Minna, even if you fail to come to an agreement with the theater—well, do you belong more to the theater than to me? We'll become betrothed, you'll stay with me, and the money still at my disposal will help us through until a secure position unites us entirely—Minna, I can offer you no more; if you disdain all this and still abandon me, you must then understand that I can no longer believe in your love. God be with you! Amen! And this is the end—I can do no more. I have spoken now as a lover and as a man and have considered everything. Do the same and speak as a woman.
Your betrothed
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner: The Burrell Collection, ed. John N. Burk (Macmillan, 1950), No. 6