[...] I did not wish to write to you at once, preferring to write more fully and more calmly on a favourable day. Then came the number of the Illustrated Paper for 12th April and once again I read through your printed article! It will be hard indeed for me to convey to you what an impression your work of friendship makes on me just now! [...]
How curiously things happen between us! If I could but describe the love which binds me to you! - You are a wonderful man and our love is wonderful! If we had not loved one another we must have hated one another intensely. I must now out with everything, which I meant to write to you with studied moderation, just as it comes into my head. I shall begin on my Siegfried early in May, come what will! Away with all guarantees of my livelihood, I shall not starve. I have at last got a publisher for my book—Avenarius of Leipzig; he is paying me 100 thalers; it is precious little but I do not think I can get any more. You will put by an odd halfpenny for me now and then. [...] Frau Ritter of Dresden does what she can from time to time; in the winter I shall earn a few louis d'or again by conducting symphonies—and so in the end I shall manage to cheat the Devil if only my wife can keep calm. So, then, we will leave Madame the Grand Duchess in peace. I cannot and may not ask anything of her even by a roundabout way.
You ask me about Judaism. You know for certain that the article is mine; why then ask me? It appeared pseudonymously, not out of fear, but to avoid the question being dragged by the Jews into the region of naked personalities. I have cherished a long-repressed resentment about this Jew business, and the grudge is as necessary to my nature as gall is to blood. An incentive came when their accursed scribblings annoyed me intensely, so at last I let fly. It seems I have struck home alarmingly, and that is as I would have it, for I really only wanted to give them just such a fright. That they will remain our masters is as certain as that, not our princes, but our bankers and the Philistines are our lords now. My attitude towards Meyerbeer is now a peculiar one. I do not hate him, he is infinitely repugnant to me. This everlastingly amiable complaisant fellow reminds me of the most muddy, I might almost say the most degraded, period of my life, when he used to make a show of protecting me. It was the period of intrigues and back-stairs, when we are made fools of by patrons for whom we inwardly care not a rap. That is an utterly dishonourable relationship. [...] I do not reproach Meyerbeer in the least for the intentional ineffectiveness of his good offices for me—on the contrary, I am glad not to be so deeply his debtor as, for example, B[erlioz]. But it was time I severed my dishonest connection with him. Outwardly I had not the least inducement to do so, for even the discovery that he did not mean honestly by me could not surprise me, nor indeed put me in the right, for at bottom I had to reproach myself with having intentionally deceived myself in him. It was from within that the impulse came to me to relinquish every consideration of ordinary self-interest with regard to him. As an artist I cannot exist in my own eyes and those of my friends, I cannot think and feel, without realising and publicly confessing my complete antagonism to Meyerbeer; and I am driven to proclaim it by sheer despair when I find again, even in my friends, the erroneous opinion that I have anything whatever in common with Meyerbeer. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 200