Dear Cecilie,
I still owe you my deepest thanks for a Christmas present of incomparable worth. Only during these last few days have I got into what I considered would be the right frame of mind to read through these letters. You will understand what I mean, since you know how eager I am to collect the family mementoes, and prevent them from being scattered abroad. None of our relations can have remained unaware of this desire of mine, which was first awoken in me some years ago and which has been growing in strength ever since, for they have all expressed their amazement that these mementoes should have been the object of such eager enquiry. I am, accordingly, most grateful to you for having shown such self-sacrifice in copying out these touching documents, whose originals, as you suppose, will one day be of great value to your children, even though they have no personal recollection of the man whose handwriting so touches us, since it brings us into immediate contact with people to whom we were once close enough to touch.
The contents of these letters, however, not only touched me, but really shook me. So rarely in domestic life do we find such a clear example of the most total self-sacrifice in pursuance of a nobly conceived end, as is the case here. I can tell you that I am almost inconsolable when I think of this self-sacrifice on the part of our father Geyer, and that especially his letters to Albert straightway filled me with a feeling of bitterness. Particularly moving was the tender, sensitive and highly cultured tone of all these letters, more especially those to our mother. I do not understand how this note of true culture could have become so debased in our family’s later dealings with each other. At the same time, however, these same letters to our mother were able to give me a clear insight into the relationship between the two of them at times of great difficulty. I believe I now see it all quite clearly, although I am bound to find it extremely hard to say in what way I see this relationship. It is as though, by sacrificing himself to the whole family, our father Geyer believed he was atoning for some sin or other. -
A printed copy of the “Massacre of the Innocents” arrived at the same time. And so, since the handwritten copy, produced no doubt at the cost of much effort thanks to your sisterly care, is in no way important autographically, but is none the less of value because of its rarity, I would ask you to allow me to return it to you herewith. -
I still owe Eduard a reply to his kind and detailed letter in the matter of the publication of my collected writings. What I have to tell him, however, is desperately little, namely that I see that the time is not yet right for me to fulfil my wish. This really emerged as the summa summarum from the proposals which he put to me. Would you be so kind as to give your kind husband my warmest good wishes, and at the same time simply inform him of this realization on my part?
But now I have a big favour to ask of you: would you apologize on my behalf to your son Richard, of whom - as you know - I think a great deal! - He sent me his philosophical treatise, accompanying it with a letter which I can most emphatically not answer until I have managed to study the treatise. But I shall have to study it; I am not a trained philosopher: with me the time for such things comes as it once came: at present I do not have that sort of time. In other words, an apology for an apology, and only the assurance of my very real delight at his letter. -
Finally I would ask you to give all your family my sincere good wishes, and to remain assured of the loyal and brotherly affection with which I sign myself
Your
Richard W.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 389