[...] Everything that I find so attractive about your letters - and especially the first of them - everything in which I rejoice from the very bottom of my heart and to which I can respond only with the warmest affection - these are points I shall not enumerate in detail, for they concern you, so to speak, as a whole person, and to treat the matter adequately I should need a great deal, a very great deal of time; but, above all, I lack the inclination which it would require to dispose of the matter with the aid of ink, pen and paper. But I shall tell you right out what it is that displeases me about your letters, or rather I shall write it down for you: since this can be quickly disposed of and may possibly be better written than said.
Listen then! -
You are still incomplete, i.e. the royal court musician is still too much a part of you, that same court musician who performs his duty, is elected to serve on the widows’ pensions committee, and who seeks to reach agreement with Müller about the “procedure” necessary to deal with this or that passage in a particular application. Your concern for increased salaries for the assistants was noble and kind: but the fact that you see the whole world as made up of assistants whose salaries ought to be a cause for your concern, that you regard this concern for salaries as more vital than your concern for me, and that you only accept me and my decisions once you feel yourself rid of this concern, - this is something about you which straightway annoyed me. Your pleasure when you finally discovered that I was receiving an annuity from Frau Laussot, - this pleasure which only now has given you the courage to accept me as I am - it struck me as being very unworthy of you, for I begrudge you no pleasure save that of the philistine, - for you are my brother. I read your most recent — enclosed - letter sitting by the hearth in the company of my friend, Jessie, and found myself growing so dreadfully depressed at it that I finally felt obliged to break off in the middle of reading out a letter from my closest friend in order that this dear woman should not be offended by a philistine’s haggling over questions of money; I was - as I say - so embittered and enraged by the unworthy pleasure you took in my “being provided for” that when Jessie insisted upon reading the letter herself after I had hesitated to go on with it, I threw it into the fire that was burning on the hearth. My dear brother, you should be glad that I acted in this way: you have been absolved by this sacrificial gesture: this letter was the final product of the vestigial court musician in you - this letter has now been scattered to the four winds, and since I know that it was the final act on the part of the court musician - his final sign of life, I hope that the latter, too, has similarly ceased to exist, at least within the soul of my brother Theodor! -
What placed this letter of yours in so glaring and disagreeable a light was the fact that it arrived enclosed with a letter from Emilie which I opened and read immediately prior to your own. Ask Emilie what I mean, she will explain and make it clear in two words, - for - believe me - this girl is far ahead of you, - and in what way? - By birth, because she is a woman. She was born a human being, - you, and all other men, are nowadays born as Philistines and only slowly and effortfully do we poor creatures succeed in becoming human. Women have remained entirely what they were at birth and alone are capable of educating us; were it not for them, we men would be hopelessly lost in no time at all. -[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 103