Dear Theodor,
It is 10 days now since I left Bordeaux. I had to travel via Paris: a great deal still continues to detain me here. Emilie’s letters were forwarded from Bordeaux, so I did not receive them until I arrived here: I intended to reply either to her, or to Frau Ritter, who has also written to me, but I am still not able to do so, even today. If I do not have a moment’s peace to write to Emilie tomorrow, I would ask you kindly to remember me to her for the time being, and to tell her that she is to retain the letter to Bakunin and Röckel, since it would now only serve to cause them the same unnecessary alarm as I myself felt on reading in the French newspapers the explicit but mistaken statement that the King had finally confirmed the death sentence on them. I am most profoundly grateful to Frau Ritter for her splendid letter: there is at present no one who needs the consolation of love more than I. -
Among those who have been most implacably displeased by the decision I have taken concerning my future activities and by the consequent abandonment of all my plans for Paris, I must unfortunately number - my poor wife. I can now see quite clearly that it was only the prospect of Paris which persuaded her to join me last year, - a prospect which she regrettably interpreted and announced to others as being far more definite than I ever gave her cause to understand. The sense of disharmony between us which began on both sides at precisely the moment when I started to become the man I am now, goes to the deepest roots of our nature: there is not a single aspect of my nature in which my wife now understands me. The letter informing her that our future had been assured by my friends was marked by a most sisterly affection, yet that letter aroused in her only a sense of humiliation: she does not understand what is involved here. She has written of what appears to her to be a necessary separation from a man “who can no longer support his wife in a way which the world would regard as decent and honourable”. I hoped that, following my reunion with her in Switzerland, I might gradually bring her round to my own point of view: in place of any fulfilment of that hope, I soon saw that only silence and the repression of my true nature could enable us to live together without daily scenes of the most violent nature. Beneath this all-consuming constraint, with no means of communicating what I felt to those in my immediate vicinity, and having constantly to deny whatever I thought and conceived, I finally began to pine away and my thoughts turned increasingly towards death. I was on the point of returning to Zurich when I was again beset by my old complaint: I am paralyzed, overcome by melancholy and unhappiness: - only love can cure me, I feel certain of that, but love is not something I shall find in my own house. I no longer feel equal to the task of conducting the most unprofitable daily arguments with the one woman who ought to be closest to me, and yet whom I shall never be able to convince. I can no longer bear this torment which weighs upon me all the more oppressively in that I can communicate it to no one: if I were to live another year like this, I should die the most shameful of deaths. After all that my wife has endured and suffered during our long years of marriage together, I have only one duty towards her: - to make her happy. She tells me that she is incapable of loving me as I am and if I do not change: and so my love for her can consist only in the wish - to make her happy. I now feel that I cannot do so living under the same roof with her: it is not simply that I am worn out by it all, - she, too, suffers as a result, since - being a woman of honour - she does not want a superficial kind of love, but rather one that is basic, i.e. one which involves a basic change in my whole nature. -
Ahead of me I see only gloom, for I feel that it is better for me to speak the plain truth about my loneliness, rather than attempt to cover it up by means of an effortful lie, which would only result in our destroying each other. I am determined that no profitless or misguided effort on my part shall prevent my wife from becoming independent of my own fate, since that is what she desires. What this means, in the light of all that we have been fated to go through together - and how fearfully my heart suffers beneath the burden of this decision - is something which only those who know me well can judge. I shall remain behind, naked and exposed, without the least token of our love, cut off from a world which would have been my ruin. Never again shall I see my dog and parrot - it must be so!
- Next week - the most decisive of my life, I shall spend in the most secluded isolation: - in Montmorency, near Paris. Let the Ritters know what I have told you today: if you all feel and understand what I must suffer in the week of torment that lies ahead, send me a token of your love, from your own hand, by way of consolation: tell me that I have found a new world, now that I have at last released my final hold on the old world. How blissful I was until recently in the thought that my wife might share in the bond which, tighter and tighter and ever more beautifully, was closing around me: but how hopelessly misunderstood this all is by this most wretched of women, whom I sincerely pity because she - cannot feel love. —
If Wigand still intends sending me the 10 louis d’or, let him send the money at once to my wife in Zurich - through Orell and Fuessli, only be quick about it. -
Fare you well, my brother! Do you feel what it means to love me? Do you feel the pain of this love? If you do not feel it, then you do not love me! Fare you well!
Yours,
Richard W.
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 105