If I can no longer be anything but unhappy in our life together, then I ask you, are you happy in it? No! Certainly not! And perhaps you are much more unhappy even than I am, for with all my suffering, with all my self-consuming, I have within myself a great, transcending faith, the faith in the truth and splendor of the cause for which I suffer and fight. You, poor woman, share no such faith. I am completely strange to you; you see only angles and deformities in me; you see in me only that which is inexplicable to you, and nowhere do you find compensation for the suffering I cause you. You cling to the peacefulness and permanence of existing conditions—I must break them to satisfy my inner being; you are capable of sacrificing everything in order to "have a respected position in the community," which I despise and with which I don't want to have anything to do; you cling with all your heart to property, to home, household, hearth—I leave all that so that I can be an individual. You think only of the past, with nostalgia and yearning—I give that up and think only of the future. All your wishes are directed toward conformity with the old, toward giving in and submitting, toward reestablishing—I have broken with everything old and fight it with all my strength. You cling to people, I to causes; you to certain human beings, I to humanity. Thus there is only disagreement between us, irreconcilable disagreement; thus we can only irritate each other without bringing each other any happiness; and perhaps you are the more unhappy—for I understand you well enough, but you don't understand me! Could it satisfy you if I were willing to force myself to a life together in which I would always conceal myself from you, deceive you about my true nature, in short, in which I would seek to lie to you about myself? Certainly not! For you are above all an honorable woman, a woman who wants to belong to her husband completely, just as she wants her husband to belong to her completely! Do you believe that I had wanted to reproach you with all I've said in this letter? Oh, no! I merely wanted to defend myself against reproaches. Everything, what and how you act and think, is completely correct and consistent with your whole nature: you are a real woman, a woman whom I advise every one fully to respect, a woman who would have made thousands happy, who even today would make every one who thinks like her happy, but who must be correspondingly unhappy with me since her way of thinking is completely different from mine. With me you are unhappy, you consume yourself, you see yourself perpetually exposed to suffering the cause of which lies in a temperament which is alien to you—namely, mine; thus you are and will remain unsatisfied, and if I were to keep a last remnant of happiness before you by deceit, that would sap my strength more every day. Here there is only one cure:
To live apart!
Just because we were united and have lived together so long and under such varied vicissitudes, should we also see our later years waste away as we have seen our youth fade? Now that after fifteen years we understand each other less than ever and are, according to our innermost being, strangers to each other, should we let the misunderstanding continue to rankle to our dying day, to our mutual, increasing misery? I know—unfortunately! unfortunately!—that I cannot make you happy by living with you! More than ever I feel the need to be able to devote myself undisturbed to my views and my beliefs in order, if need be, to take action accordingly: I can thrive only in the company of kindred souls. How terribly harsh would I seem to you, you—whom I don't even want to condemn for being what you are? I recognize your virtues, your splendid qualities in the fullest measure and can therefore only hope not to have to torture and torment you any longer. You have often said to me, "When you are this way or that, or do thus or so, I hate you!" Dear Minna! Why hate me? If we remember each other in the spirit in which we understood and loved each other, we'll be able to love each other even after the separation. For the sake of the love which still remains between us I say: Let us remain separated!
Thus I actually merely confirm that with which you have often threatened me, which you often frankly longed for, half carried out even, and recently have again had in mind. Thus I am determined that I for my part shall make no further attempt to hold you by deceptions—deceptions which only aggravate our life together. I now say to you: "Do what you have already wanted to do repeatedly, and have threatened me with doing at every opportunity"—only just recently when you wrote me: "If I must move again by the end of summer, I would rather leave today." I could not possibly spend next winter in Zürich; the climate is definitely harmful to my nervous system: I would have had to ask you to leave Zürich with me. This way I merely say to you—Carry out your threat—it will be better for you and me! Let us sever our fate—forget me the way I now am and be happy without me! For with me you cannot possibly be happy any more!
But while I say this quietly and as a sensible human being, I feel at the same time the tremendous grief that is involved when I take leave of all my old, familiar world! What you have often and violently spoken of, separation, I now confirm after a long and terrible inward struggle: I do not say it thoughtlessly, but in the final and firm conviction that it must be so and that it can no longer be anything else! When I say to you: "Yes! Let us separate!" I mean that we will not see each other again, that I part with everything I have owned and all that habit has made dear and precious to me: neither dog nor bird do I want to see again, no keepsake do I want preserved. Whatever else has belonged to us does not belong to me: it is yours; dispose of it as you see fit: I don't even want to see anything of my writings. Leave Zürich or stay! Alas, I even have to give up my Zürich friends. Where I am going I do not know! Don't inquire about me! But I shall always do everything to find out whether you are well.
So then I have only one last request to make of you. It is the most important one I can make in these difficult circumstances. Minna! Minna! Dear Minna! Grant me this request or you will make me boundlessly unhappy! Whatever you choose to do, wherever you go, just do this one thing! I beg you, I entreat you fervently to do it, as a token that you still love me a little tiny bit: of the yearly allowance allotted to me take half in support of your pitiful existence! It is earned, believe me; it is earned; you don't have to be ashamed of it! I could prove to you that the half which would go to you will be the equivalent of an obligation I have assumed. I know your great pride, your strong feeling of independence! Oh, don't use it against me! Overcome your resistance just this one more time! Just see! You will drive me crazy and surely hasten my death if you refuse me this last request, if you leave me with the terrible idea that the poor woman who has sacrificed her youth, everything to me—in vain—is destitute or serves strange people! I implore you, by all that is holy to you, grant me this request! Permit me for the time being to send your poor good mother in Dresden 100 thaler quarterly: it shall start with the 1st of July! Some day, when your parents die, I shall always send it to you directly or any other way you wish! With the other half I shall, in the greatest seclusion, get along so much the better since I can easily earn something here and there. I can almost assume, dear Minna, that you'll grant me this last, most sacred request! I assume it, as the last token of love you have to send me. Baumgartner, to whom I am turning in this matter, will get you what you need till the 1st of July! The grand piano is yours! Ten—earned—louis d'or also will be sent you by Wigand from Leipzig.
After this last request, just a final piece of advice, although you might no longer be inclined to accept advice from me. If you want to avoid sensation, conceal from our more superficial acquaintances in Zürich what has happened between us, tell them, when you leave, that your departure from Zürich is because of a message from me according to which I was to remain in Paris and you were to follow me. In this way you will best avoid all sensation. If you go to Dresden, you will merely have to hold to your old story when speaking to your friends; since I no longer have an established home and don't want to write an opera for Paris either, you are carrying out your intention and are for the moment living—by your own choice—in the enjoyment of your friendships there which you actually do desire—separated from me.
And if you should say: Divorce? Why that? Why get a divorce? Even though we can no longer live together, we can still belong to each other before the world. Before the world you will always remain my wife, as long as you wish. Only when you should not want it this way any more, when our complete divorce could be of use to you—when you perhaps may find a man who would be more capable than I of making you happy—only then would our divorce make any sense; only then would I find even this last awful and painful resort necessary.
O Minna! Minna! Separated from you I am separated from a whole world! From a world in which I suffered, in which I received hardly any consideration and appreciation for my suffering, but which had become familiar, dear, and cherished to me. Yes, I feel it! He who wants to follow his inner call completely must be endowed with iron courage, for he must make terrible sacrifices: whether I have this courage I do not yet know, I only know that I must no longer hesitate to break off a relationship openly and honestly in which both of us fellow sufferers have long ceased to belong to each other, in which we were bound one to the other artificially, to our mutual consuming torture. May my courage not forsake me! But may you also gain the courage, without scolding me, without hating me, to turn toward a new life in which you can still enjoy many a happy hour, if you only have the courage! Farewell! Farewell! My wife! My old, dear companion in misfortune! Oh, if you could only have shared the joys which I draw from my great faith, how happy you would have been with me despite all privation! It was not granted to me to reward you in this way! May I now succeed in this way—through the separation—in reconciling you to your life, in bringing you peace and comfort! Farewell! Farewell! For two weeks I have wept a thousand bitter tears over this distressing separation! But it must be! Every hesitation would be fatal weakness! Fatal for you and me! Farewell! Farewell! My good Minna! Farewell! Think only of the happiest hours we spent together; then you will be happy in remembering me, just as I will think of you only with nostalgia and love after this separation! Farewell! Farewell! For the last time I kiss you fervently.
Your
Richard W.
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner: The Burrell Collection, ed. John N. Burk (Macmillan, 1950), No. 89