[...] May I ask you to convey to the Princess v. Wittgenstein, whose most friendly letter I found so cheering, my warmest thanks for her kindness in writing? The sincere interest which she has again accorded my Lohengrin, especially at its last performance, is of inestimable value to me. What especially enthralled me were her intelligent remarks on the role of Ortrud, and the comparison which she draws between the performance of the earlier interpreter of the part and the present one. To which side I myself incline will at once become clear to your honoured friend if I indicate my views on this character simply by saying that Ortrud is a woman who - does not know love. This says it all - and a most terrible thing it is to say. Her nature is politics. A male politician disgusts us, a female politician appals us: it was this appallingness which I had to portray. There is one love which this woman feels, love of the past, of departed generations, the dreadfully insane love of ancestral pride which can express itself only as hatred towards all that lives, all that really exists. In a man such love becomes ludicrous, but in a woman it is terrible, because women - given their powerful and natural need for love - must love something, and ancestral pride, a hankering after the past, thus becomes a murderous fanaticism. We know of no more appalling phenomena in the whole of history than women politicians. And so it is not jealousy of Elsa - on Friedrich’s account, for example - which motivates Ortrud, rather does her entire passion reveal itself in the scene in Act II when - following Elsa’s disappearance from the balcony - she leaps up from the minster steps and calls out to her old, long-vanished gods. She is a reactionary, a woman concerned only for what is outdated and for that reason is hostile to all that is new - and hostile, moreover, in the most rabid sense of the word: she would like to eradicate the world and nature, simply in order to breathe new life into her decaying gods. But this is no idiosyncratic, sickly whim on the part of Ortrud, rather does this passion consume her with the whole weight of a woman’s longing for love - a longing which is stunted, undeveloped and deprived of an object: and that is why she is so fearfully impressive. For that reason, there must be nothing in the least trivial about her portrayal: she must never appear to be simply malicious or spiteful; every expression of her scorn, of her malice, must allow us to glimpse the full force of her terrible madness, which can be satisfied only with the destruction of others, or - of herself.
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 136