Dear Minna,
Thus I address you still, in spite of your signature on the last letter which I received from you and in which you asked that in future I should refer to you as Sie. “Dear Minna”: that is how I address you in this difficult hour as I appear before you today, - that is how I addressed you in the past, before the most terrible and irreparable discord divided us, and that is how — if you do not begrudge me this favour - you shall continue for ever to live in my memory! -
Your letters to me in Bordeaux came as a violent jolt and roused me from a beautiful and last remaining delusion concerning ourselves: I thought that I had finally won you, I wrongly imagined I had seen you yield to the power of true love - and with terrible pain now felt more than ever before the unerring certainty that we no longer belong to each other. From that moment I could take no more: I could no longer speak to a soul, - I wanted to leave quickly - to join you; I hurriedly took my leave of my friends and hastened to Paris in order to return at once to Zurich. I have now been here for 2 weeks: my old nervous disorder has returned; it lies on me like a spectre, - I must shake it off, I must do so for my own sake - and for yours. - Listen to me!
The fundamental differences between us have proved, to a greater or lesser extent, to be a torment both for me and, more especially, for you, ever since the time we first became acquainted. I at least have no need to remind you of the countless scenes which have passed between us since the earliest days of our marriage, - for I have no doubt but that you have a livelier memory of them than I do. Yet what bound me so irresistibly to you then was love, a love which was blind to all the differences between us, - a love, however, which you did not share, at least not to the extent that it governed me. It was really only through sheer necessity that you yielded to my insistent demands that we should be married: perhaps you felt everything for me that you were capable of feeling. - But the one emotion which really mattered, and which enables us to bear all our sufferings with a smile - unconditional love, the love with which we love the other person as he is and love him, moreover, for the man he is, - this love was something you could never feel, for you have never understood me, even in the past when you always wanted me to be other than the man I in fact am. Ever since we were reunited, following that first disruption to our marriage, your only guiding principle has been your sense of duty towards me, - duty which bade you suffer with me all the hardships we bore in Paris, and even in the last but one letter you sent me, you wrote simply of duty with reference to that period, - not of love. If you had felt any genuine love in your heart at that time, you would not now boast of having endured those sufferings; no, rather should your firm belief in me and in what I am have encouraged you to see in those sufferings a necessary evil of the kind people willingly accept for the sake of some higher goal, whereby they think only of that higher goal, are happy in their consciousness of that higher goal, and in that way forget the baser sufferings which they have to endure as a result. But you - being the woman you are - have subsequently found no compensation, - all you can ever think of is your suffering!
Ever since I first took up my appointment in Dresden, your growing dissatisfaction with me has made itself increasingly felt each time that I - ignoring my personal advantages - refused, in the interests of my art and my independence as man and artist, to submit any longer to the wretched conditions imposed by the management of that cultural institution, but chose, instead, to rebel against them. Anyone who observed me at that decisive period of my life and who attempted to understand me will be bound to admit that everything I did was the inevitable and rightful consequence of my own artistic nature to which I ever remained loyal - in spite of all personal dangers. That I finally rebelled not only as an artist but as a man against all those wicked conditions which - given my passionate nature - were bound to inflict greater torment upon me than on anyone else: all this must seem readily explicable - and hence entirely justifiable in the sight of any impartial observer who had followed my progress closely and seen how step by step - not by leaps and bounds - I had reached my present standpoint as man and artist: such an observer would be bound to admit that my actions here were not arbitrary or the result of vanity on my part, for he would have seen how I suffered in the process; he would, accordingly, have spoken words of comfort and encouragement, and my wife would have done the same if she had taken the trouble to understand me, for which she would certainly not have required any book-learning, but only love! - Each time I returned home, out of humour & irritated by some new vexation, some new insult or some new disaster, what did this wife of mine bestow upon me instead of the comfort and consoling sympathy I sought? Reproaches, new reproaches, nothing but reproaches! Domestically inclined, I nevertheless remained at home, but, finally, it was not to express my thoughts, to communicate my feelings or receive consolation, but to suffer in silence, to be eaten away by cares, and - to be alone! This eternal constraint beneath which I had already lived so long, and which never allowed me to let myself go without incurring the most violent scenes - this constraint, I say, weighed upon me and destroyed my health. What comparison is there between the physical care which you admittedly lavished on me in abundance, and the intellectual care needed to nurse a man of my inner excitability? I expect my wife still recalls how she once forced herself to nurse me on my sickbed for a whole week, coldly & unlovingly, because she could not forgive me for a hasty remark I had made before I fell ill?
Enough! The hour of decision struck: I had to flee and leave everything behind. I had only a single wish before leaving Germany for good, and that was to see my wife again! Nothing else mattered, I would have allowed myself to be taken prisoner, - I refused to leave without this one consolation. But when my wife finally made up her mind to yield to my entreaties, it was not to offer me consolation or to receive consolation from my embrace, - but simply to enable an obstinate individual to go on his way at last - albeit to save his own life. I can never forget the night when I was awoken in my place of refuge in order to receive my wife: she stood before me cold and reproachful & spoke the words: “well, I’ve come, just as you demanded: I expect you’re content now! Continue your journey, I shall be setting off back home this very night!” - I finally succeeded in persuading you to stay with me in Jena for a sincere and warm farewell. This farewell was my consolation from afar. I had but a single thought: a prompt and immediate reunion. I begged this of you in my letters in fiery and emotional terms. It was then that I received from you that unfortunate letter, while I was staying in the country near Paris; its loveless, heartless contents turned my blood to ice. In it you declared that you would not come back to me until such time as I could support you in foreign parts by means of a regular income: you also said quite clearly that you no longer felt any love for me. - All that has happened since then will still be fresh in your memory. You wrote to me again and announced your decision to join me in Zurich: I was permitted to hope once more! Yes, I cherished the hope that I might still be able to win you over to my own point of view, to convince you of the validity of my ideas, and finally to make you more familiar with my outlook. I was at constant pains to spare you from material cares. You came, - how happy I was! And yet - wretch that I am! you had not come to share both joy & sorrow with me as I was, - but you had come to visit the Wagner whom you assumed was shortly to compose an opera for Paris! In Dresden you were too ashamed to say that you were coming to join me in Switzerland, - and so you pretended you were going to Paris and that your husband - as you yourself probably believed - already had a firm commission in his pocket. Oh, the monstrous delusion under which we both laboured could only become clearer as the days passed! All my views & ideas remained an abomination to you - you detested my writings, in spite of the fact that I tried to make clear to you that they were now more necessary to me than all my useless attempts to write operas. You leapt to the defence of every one who did not share my views, - and you condemned all those who did, - I was not even allowed to speak out in their favour. Your only regret was our earlier life together, - whereas all that you looked for in the future was to be reconciled with that way of life, or else - a success in Paris. My entire being you saw as an object of loathing and contempt: every moment, ah! almost every movement I made seemed calculated to cause you offence. - In a word, it was only now that I first felt so boundlessly alone in your company, because I now saw that it was impossible to win you over. If I took up my plans for Paris again with greater seriousness than had formerly been the case, it was simply to escape from you, and to find peace and quiet elsewhere. The inner constraints which I had felt in doing so, the loathsome struggle against my real convictions, the impossibility of explaining my actions to those in my immediate vicinity or of finding consolation, help and advice there, - all these factors produced in me a state of mind which could only aggravate my physical indisposition through an additional mental disorder. I continued to wrestle with the question as to whether I should set off for Paris in this frame of mind: weak & frail as I was, I approached you that final Sunday & asked: “Minna, should I not at least wait for a letter from Belloni!” But you had already grown tired of the long delay - for all you ever talked about was Paris - ; you were also waiting to scrub down the parlour and have the whole apartment cleaned; - in a word - you did not understand your wretch of a husband on this occasion either, but replied to my question in a tone of vexation, so that, tired & ill, I left the house, regardless of the weather, booked my ticket there & then, & was now resolved at least to act, since I knew the life I would lead if I chose to remain. -
It was here in Paris - prompted by the sight of the most contemptible trafficking in art - that, suffering torments of every description, I seized upon the firm resolve once & for all of renouncing what it was impossible for me to do, & of turning my back irrevocably on this whole miserable business. I had only one care - not for myself, but for you, for the sake of the lives we had led together. Look! A bond of friendship of the rarest & most ennobling kind had been forged, - my cares had suddenly been lifted: you yourself had been informed of this. I wrote to you from Bordeaux to tell you that I know only one happiness, to be able to live peacefully with you in Zurich for the sake of our mutual health, and in that way create my operas to my heart’s content.
Your letter has now destroyed all that! You now stand implacably before me, - you look for honour where I must needs see what almost amounts to shame, and are humiliated by all that I regard as most welcome. As I say: it was not to me that you came to Zurich, but to the composer of a new opera commissioned for Paris. Yes, now I understand everything! You refer me to an earlier letter - I know the one, it is the letter you wrote last year! You haven’t changed! - The fact that you do not love me emerges clearly and unambiguously from every line you wrote, for you ridicule everything I hold most dear, even my use of the word “du” with which - in accordance with my innermost feelings - I choose to address those whom I do not wish to alienate. - In what then can my love consist? Only in the wish to requite you for your youth, which you have wasted with me, and for the hardships you have undergone with me, and to make you happy. Can I still hope to achieve this by living together with you? — Impossible!
If I can only be unhappy living with you, I must ask you whether our living together makes you happy? No! certainly not! and you may perhaps be much more unhappy than I am, for, in spite of all my suffering and self-wasting, I have a great transcending faith in myself, faith in the truth and splendour of the cause for which I suffer & struggle. You, most wretched of women, do not share that faith. I am a total stranger to you, you see only my warts and excrescences, you see only what you find inexplicable about me, and nowhere find compensation for the injuries you suffer at my hands. You hanker after peace and permanence in relationships - I must break them down in order to satisfy my inner being; you are capable of sacrificing everything to have a “respectable position” in the bourgeois world, a world I despise and refuse to associate with; you hanker exclusively after goods & chattels, hearth & home, - I relinquish all that in order to be a human being. You think of the past only with longing and regret, - I abandon it and think only of the future. All your desires are directed at a reconciliation with what is old, at compromise and conformism, and at re-establishing old ties, - I have broken with all that is old, and fight against it with every ounce of my strength. You cling to people, I to causes; you to individual human beings, I to the whole of humanity. Thus there is only disunity between us, irreconcilable disunity: thus we can only wear each other down, without ever bringing each other happiness: and perhaps you are the unhappier of us two, - you, - for I understand you well enough, whereas you do not understand me! Would it satisfy you if I were to force myself to live with you and lead a life in which I was always concealing myself from you, deceiving you as to my true nature, in a word, seeking to lie to you about myself? Of course not! For you are above all else a woman of honour, a woman who wishes to belong entirely to her husband, just as she wishes her husband to belong entirely to her! Do you think that my only reason for writing this letter is to shower you with reproaches? No! It was I who wished to defend myself against reproaches. Everything you do and think, and the way in which you act and think, is perfectly correct & consistent in terms of your character as a whole: you are a whole woman, a wife whom I would advise other people fully to respect, a wife who could have brought happiness to thousands, and who even now could bring happiness to a husband who shared her views, - but who is bound to be unhappy with me inasmuch as her views are so totally dissimilar from mine. With me you are unhappy, you are wasting away, you imagine yourself constantly exposed to sufferings whose cause is to be found in a nature totally alien to your own - in mine; and so you are dissatisfied & will always remain so, and my strength would daily ebb away if I had to feign a final remnant of happiness in these circumstances. - Our only salvation is:
To live apart!
Should we be influenced by the consideration that we have been married now for so long and have lived together through such varied adventures? should we therefore watch our declining years slip away, just as we saw our youth fade & wither? We who, at the end of 15 years, understand each other less than ever before & who are condemned by our innermost natures to face each other as total strangers, shall we allow this misunderstanding to continue to rankle until our dying day, causing us both increasing torment? I know - alas! alas! - that I cannot bring you happiness, living together with you! More than ever I feel the need to be able to devote myself undisturbed to my ideas and my faith, so that, if need be, I may even defend those ideas with actions: I can thrive only in the company of like-minded people. How dreadfully unfeeling would I seem to you - you whom I refuse to condemn for being as you are? I fully recognize your virtues and your other splendid qualities, and for that reason can only hope not to torment and torture you any longer. You often said to me: “when you are like this or like that, or when you behave in a particular way, I hate you!” Dear Minna! what is the point of hating me? If we can retain a memory of those features which we understood & admired in each other, we may continue to love each other even after we are separated. For the sake of what remains of the love which still exists between us, I say to you: let us remain apart!
[...]
I have only one last favour to ask of you! It is the most important request I can put to you in these difficult circumstances. Minna! Minna! dear Minna! fulfil this request of mine, or you will make me boundlessly unhappy! - Whatever you choose to do, wherever you go, do this at least! I beg you, I entreat you most earnestly, as a sign that you still feel the tiniest glimmer of love for me: - Accept half the yearly allowance which has been allotted me, and use it to support your pitiful existence! It has been earned, believe me, it has been earned, you need not feel ashamed to accept it! I could furnish you with proof of the fact that at least the half which falls to your share has been earned in return for an obligation which I have assumed. I know your great pride, your man’s self-sufficiency! Oh, do not use it to scourge me! Overcome your inclinations, just this once! If not, you will drive me insane, and certainly hasten my death if you refuse me this final request, if you abandon me to the terrible notion that the most wretched of women, who has sacrificed her youth and everything else to me - in vain! - might suffer starvation in years to come, or go into service with strangers! I entreat you in the name of all you hold dear, grant me this request! Allow me as a provisional arrangement to transfer to your poor good mother in Dresden the sum of 100 thalers each quarter: it shall start with the first of July! On the death of your parents, I shall continue to have this sum transferred to you, directly, or in whatever way you desire! With the other half I shall retire to a place of the greatest seclusion, where I shall get by all the more easily in that I shall easily be able to earn a little extra from time to time. - I shall take it for granted, my dear Minna, that you will not deny me this final, most solemn request! I acknowledge your acceptance as the final token of our love which you have to send me. - What you need to keep you going until the first of July will be provided for you by Baumgartner to whom I intend writing in this matter! The grand piano is yours! - In addition, 10 - well-earned - louis d’or will be sent to you from Wigand in Leipzig. -
Following this final request, I have a final piece of advice, although you may not be inclined to accept advice from me. - If you wish to avoid notice, conceal what has happened between us from our more superficial acquaintances in Zurich: tell them, when you leave, that your departure from Zurich is the result of a message you have received from me according to which I am remaining in Paris and that I have sent for you to join me there. In that way you will best avoid notice. - If you go to Dresden, all you need do is stick to your old story in conversation with your acquaintances there: since I am no longer of any fixed abode and do not intend writing an opera for Paris, you can say that you have not changed your mind but that for the moment - of your own choice - you intend to enjoy the society of your various friends there, which you have indeed been hankering after - separated from me.
And if you were to suggest a divorce? Why that? Why should we be divorced? We cannot live together any more, but we can always continue to belong to each other in the eyes of the world. In the eyes of the world you will always be my wife, as long as you wish, - only when you no longer wish it, when a complete divorce could be of use to you, - if you were perhaps to find a husband who was more capable than I of making you happy - only then would our divorce make sense, only then would I find it necessary to accept this final dreadful and painful step. -
Oh Minna! Minna! Separated from you, I am now separated from an entire world! From a world in which I suffered, and where I received little respect or appreciation for my anguish, yet a world which had grown familiar to me, & which I had come to love & cherish. Yes, I can feel it! The man who wishes wholly to follow his inner calling must be endowed with iron courage, for he has terrible sacrifices to make: whether I have such courage I do not yet know, - all I do know is that I could delay no longer in destroying our relationship, openly & honestly, a relationship in which we two companions in adversity had long since ceased to belong to each other, & in which we could bind ourselves to each other only by artificial means, to our mutual and most consuming torment. I pray that my courage will not fail me! But I pray that you, too, may find the courage - without growing angry with me, without hating me - to start a new life in which happiness may yet smile upon you, especially if you have the courage! Fare you well! Fare you well! My wife! My old, dear companion in adversity! Oh, if only I could have shared with you the joys I derive from my great faith, how happy you would have been with me in spite of all our hardships! It was not granted to me to requite you in that way! I pray that I may now succeed - through our separation - in reconciling you once more with your life, and in bringing you peace & contentment! Fare you well! Fare you well! I have wept a thousand bitter tears during the last 2 weeks because of this most grievous separation! But it must be so! Every delay would betray a fatal weakness! Fatal for you & me! - Fare you well! Fare you well! Minna! My good Minna, fare you well. Think only of the happiest hours we have spent together, & you will also be happy in your memory of me, just as, when parted from you, I shall remember you only with melancholy & with love! Fare you well! Fare you well! Let me kiss you passionately this one last time.
Your
Richard W.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 106