My dearest wife, it grieves me very much to think that you mean to leave me alone so much longer. Dear Minna, we really ought not to be separated for such a long time, and I feel that again deeply and intensely. What is a whole capital, with its 70,000 inhabitants, compared with what you are? When I have nothing to do I am miserable alone, and when I am tired with a long day's work and come home at evening to a house empty of you, I hate the fireside which I find so restful otherwise. And yet away from the house there is nothing to compensate me for a moment.
One passage in your letter I cannot quite understand. You speak of the possible necessity of our being separated longer. Where is the necessity? When I was pursuing the soaring hopes and plans, which you never shared with me, and left Russia under conditions which might have frightened the stoutest-hearted man, did you then talk of the necessity of parting from me? By God, I should have had to acknowledge you right then! But it never so much as occurred to you. When storm and danger were at their height, when you saw nothing but a horrible death before you as reward for all the hardships lived through with me, you only begged me to hold you very close in my arms so that, when we were on the verge of starvation, you had more than one chance of saving yourself. One word and Frau von Zech, who loved you so much, would have taken you with her to Gotha. Leplay herself forgot her stinginess for you and would have taken you back home as her travelling companion. Why didn't you talk then of a necessity for separating? You see I could have answered you nothing then. But now, when I feel increasingly that I hold my future in my hands, now I ask why you talk of this necessity? Tell me, what makes you so faint-hearted?
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 72