Dear Theodor, you will at least have received my letter by now, presumably on the same day I received yours; & I hope that this circumstance will have put paid to several of your reproaches, or at least have caused you to modify them a little. I have become caught up here in a fearful whirl of work & drudgery; the whole responsibility for the opera here was unloaded on to me; we finally got going yesterday with Zampa, & the event may be said to have met with considerable success. And so I do not need to worry any more about that side of things; and in every other respect, too, I feel a much greater sense of stability; only in one respect shall I probably turn out to be a knave, - & you are the only person I shall tell this to. You know my modern attitude towards love, which is what first brought me together with Minna; my wretched bourgeois outlook soon usurped my more modern views, & all that was left was love; - I reached the stage of feeling jealous, took offence at Minna’s reputation, & finally convinced myself, to my own happy misfortune, that Minna has never been wicked, nor is she now; in a word, I am now convinced & fully persuaded of that fact. This once so cold, unapproachable, & indifferent creature has given me her boundless trust, - I know every feature of her life: - I have fired her to the very marrow of her being, I have transformed her into a tender, devoted woman, - she loves me to the point of sickness, I have become her tyrant; - not a soul crosses her threshold if I do not wish it; she sacrifices everything to me; she is totally unrecognizable on stage, she has life, warmth, ardour. She has rejected Barby's hand for my sake; a fellow like Lauer pines away, stricken by his platonic love for her, & becomes a poet; the more she understood my pitiful bourgeois outlook, the more she felt drawn towards me; - she has only one wish, there is only one thing that will make her happy, - to be joined together with me in marriage, - an aim she would like to achieve whatever the sacrifice involved. She is tender withal; crying her heart out, she once said to me, “Richard, be honest; - don't entertain any false hopes about me which you may not intend to fulfil; - if you tell me you love me but that you don’t want to marry me, I shall bewail & bemoan the fact that my finest hopes & desires have been irretrievably blighted & destroyed by your will, & I shall only be happy in your love as long as you bestow it on me, - but I shall never give my love to anyone else. But now, if you flatter these hopes of mine, & encourage me to believe myself secure in entertaining them, & if at the same time you yourself do not take them seriously any longer, you would be committing the most dreadful sin!” And what do you think my reply was? In order not to hurt the dear girl, I nodded in silent approval, and she believes me, whereas all I can think of is how best to go about betraying her. And I rejoice in my own inner strength, whereby I never give her a serious hearing; - it’s a kind of knavery. She is completely free with her favours with me, almost to the point of excess, so that I feel increasingly strong & well; the pleasure I have of her, far from sating & wearying me, binds me even more tightly & warmly to her. What do you say to all this? If I were to deceive her intentionally, would that not be a masterpiece of behaviour on my part? Or should I become a philistine? You lot in Leipzig will have to decide!
This love, with its beginning and its end, will turn into a short story, - a modern condition; - add to it the whole sorry state of my affairs, not to mention the lessons I’m learning along the way, & you’ll have a novel.
Adieu.
Your
Richard.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 14