[...] As regards the performance of my "Nibelung" dramas I think you [...] take a too happy view of my future. I do not count at all on their being performed—not, at least, in my lifetime—and above all not in Berlin or Dresden. These and such-like great towns and their public are certainly not for me any more. As an audience I can only imagine an assembly of friends gathered together expressly for the purpose of seeing my work, preferably in some fair solitude—somewhere far from the smoke and pestilential industrial reek of our urban civilisation. As such a solitude I can picture Weimar, possibly, but certainly no larger town. [...]
The Princess von Wittgenstein has cheered me with a very friendly letter and I ask you to convey to her my warmest thanks for her kindness. The deep interest which she has accorded my Lohengrin, particularly at the last performance, is of inestimable value to me. I was especially struck by her intelligent comments on Ortrud's role, and her comparison of the merits of the former and present performers in this part. Your esteemed friend will see at once to which side I lean when I indicate my view of the character in the simple statement that Ortrud is a woman who—does not know love. Everything—a most terrible everything—is expressed in that sentence. Her nature is a political one. A politically-minded man is repugnant, a politically-minded woman is horrible—and it was this horrible thing that I had to portray. There is love in the woman, love of the past, of departed generations, the frightful insane pride of ancestry, which can only find actual present expression in hatred of all that lives. Such a love is ridiculous in a man, but in a woman it is terrible, because a woman—with her natural strong need of love—must love something, and pride of ancestry, the bias to the past, here grows to murderous fanaticism. We know no more appalling phenomena in history than political women. Therefore it is not jealousy of Elsa—on Friedrich's account perchance—that governs Ortrud, but the whole truth of her passion is revealed only in that scene in the second act when, after Elsa's disappearance from the terrace, she leaps upon the minster steps and calls upon her old, long-vanished gods. She is a reactionary, thinking alone of old things and therefore hostile—in the most ferocious sense of the word—to everything new. She would extirpate the world and nature to bring her outworn gods to life once more. But this is no obstinate morbid whim in Ortrud, for she gives herself to this passion with the whole force of a woman's longing for love, recently embittered, stunted and deprived of its object, and therefore she is magnificently terrible. There should accordingly be nothing in the least petty in her portrayal. There should be no chance of her seeming merely malicious or spiteful. Through every expression of her disdain and hate there should be visible the full force of a terrible madness, only to be assuaged by the annihilation of others—or herself. Whichever of the two actresses came nearest to this view of mine should therefore be held the better.—[...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 210