My good Minna,
I received your letter around midday: I wasted no time in drafting a reply for you and, since it must reach the post by 5 o’clock at the latest - which is why I cannot frank it - , I have left myself very little time on this occasion to address even a couple of lines to you yourself. It is impossible for anyone to act more kindly, nobly and more delicately than our friend Frau Laussot! I should have thought, my dear wife, that you would find it most edifying to see the deep impression which your husband’s works are capable of producing on healthy, unperverted and noble hearts, and to know that he is able to persuade others to take such selfless decisions, decisions, moreover, which are prompted by the most heartfelt concern! Can you find it in your heart to despise this success which I owe to my art - for this alone has produced it - or even to rate it lower than these so-called “brilliant” successes as are nowadays achieved, thanks to speculation and cunning, by the stupid, slovenly, heartless mass of our great theatre-going public? You see now what these faint-hearted, sluggish people are like - people whom I once appeared to please, but who now treat me so shabbily. Shall we despise these people and think only about money? All right, here is money, as much as we need for a quiet, not to say comfortable, life, - it has not been extorted from the scurvy masses, but was offered to me in the most delicate fashion by a noble heart which rejoiced in my works - just as I have created them in accord with my true inner nature! What more do you want? - Of course, my poor good wife, I understand you, I know you and can see what the basic problem is, for all the differences between us: I hope that in replying to Frau Laussot I have hit upon your true and innermost thoughts! -
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Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 102