I have now received two letters from you for which I have to thank you today, and to which I should like to reply without any further delay. I am also in your debt for sending me Hanslick’s brochure (you interpreted my telegram perfectly correctly). Let me say straightaway what the reason was for my asking for this piece. I intend re-editing “Judaism in Music”: it will take the following form. A letter to Mme Moukhanoff (Kalergis), who asked with some astonishment how it has come about that the press etc. keeps on attacking me, of all people, with such unrelenting hostility? This sense of astonishment - which has also slipped into many another innocent reporter’s writings about me - shall not be allowed to continue a moment longer. My initial response is a reprint of my 18-year-old article, only somewhat cleaned up in terms of its style. - It annoys me to have to think of the possibility of dying without first having corrected a good many of the errors of judgement on the part of entirely fair-minded people which have been intentionally maintained. I am anxious to put things straight, and also to recover what has been lost: hence my recent demand that Heim should help me locate a number of musical trifles from my earliest days. -
Of all the news that you were kind enough to send me concerning events in Munich and, more especially, your activities there, it was your speech to the orchestra and the censure of it in the press which gave me greatest pause for thought. Of course, every word you said to the musicians was just and salutary: but perhaps it was not only not entirely right but even perhaps unjust that your warning to the artists became a kind of denunciation of the audience. I believe an audience should never be criticized: it will always retain the sovereignty of a child. How should it be reproached for its taste? After all, it fails utterly and completely to hear or see what strikes us artists as being essential. It clings to the events on stage, and to nothing else, but in these - as you know - it takes a wholly personal interest: but of all that lies behind these events and which we ourselves consider the only true object of art, it knows not a thing. And herein lies our entire consolation: for we can hope to present ourselves and our higher aims behind these events on stage; and in that way we shall persuade our audiences, by means of the correct illusion, to acquire, without noticing it, a greater refinement of taste.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 372