Dear Minna! So I still call you, despite the signature of the last letter I had from you, making it a condition that I should call you "you" for the present. "Dear Minna!" So I call you as I approach you to-day in this heavy hour, so I used to call you once, before this worst and most irremediable discord of the spirit had come between us, and so, if you will grant it me, you shall always live in my remembrance. Your letters to Bordeaux have roughly awakened me from a beautiful, a last illusion about ourselves. I believed I had won you at last; I fondly imagined I had seen you soften before the might of true love, and then, with terrible anguish, realised more than ever the absolute certainty that we belong to each other no more. After that I could bear it no longer. I could speak to no one, wanted to get away quickly to you, left my friends in haste and hurried to Paris, meaning to go on from there with all speed to Zurich. Well, I have been here again for a fortnight. My old nerve trouble has overtaken me again; it lies upon me like an incubus. I must shake it off, I must, for my own sake and for yours. Listen to me!
Our essential unlikeness of nature has given pain, sometimes slight, sometimes intense, to me and especially to you, all the time we have known each other. It is not I who need to remind you of the numberless scenes between us from the very first, for they probably live in your memory more vividly even than they do in mine. What bound me nevertheless so irresistibly to you at those times was love; a love that looked beyond all differences, a love which you, however, did not share, at least not in the degree in which it dominated me. You really only submitted perforce to my urgent desire for union. Perhaps you felt for me all that you were capable of feeling at all, but as regards that essential thing by the help of which every trouble is smilingly faced, love unqualified, the love whereby we love another for what he really is and as he is, that love you could not feel, for you did not understand me even then and were always imagining me to be something other than I really am.
Ever since our reunion after that first breach in our married life, it has really been only duty which has governed your relation to me. After I got the appointment in Dresden your disapproval of me increased just at the time and just in the degree that I, forgetful of personal advantage, in the interests of my art and of my artistic and human independence, found myself no longer able to submit to the wretched conditions of management of that institution for art and revolted against it. Anyone who had watched me and tried to understand me at that critical period of my life would have to admit that all that I did was done as the inevitable and righteous consequence of my artistic nature, to which, in face of all kinds of personal risks, I remained consistently true. The fact that I was at length brought to revolt, not only as an artist but as a man too, against all this tyranny which none could feel more acutely than I with my passionate nature, should be very explicable to anyone who observed me closely. Such a one would be bound to acknowledge that I did not act out of caprice or vanity, for he would have seen how I suffered under it all. Consequently he would have consoled and encouraged me, and my wife might have done this had she taken the trouble to understand me, to do which she needed no book-learning, but simply love.
Enough. The fateful hour struck. I was compelled to flee, leaving all behind me. I had but one wish before leaving Germany altogether, to see my wife once more. I was indifferent to everything else; I would have let myself be captured, but without this solace I would not go. At last my wife gave way to my supplications, not to bring me that solace, not to receive consolation herself in my embrace once more, but simply to humour an obstinate person and induce him to go away to save himself, to be sure. Never can I forget the night when I was awakened in my place of hiding to receive my wife. Cold and reproachful she stood before me and said, "Well, I am come, as you were so determined on it. Now perhaps you will be satisfied! Start on your journey now, I shall go back to-night in any case!" At Jena at last I did succeed in winning a warm and loving farewell from you. That parting comforted me in exile. I had only one idea in my head: a speedy and instant reunion. Ardently, with all my heart, I besought you for this in my letters. Then finally in the country near Paris I received that deplorable letter which froze me to ice with its lovelessness and heartlessness. You told me you would not come to me till I could earn money to support you abroad, and you said clearly that you no longer felt any love for me. You will remember what has happened since then. You wrote to me again announcing your decision to join me at Zurich. I might hope again! Yes, I cherished a hope that I might be able to win you wholly to me at last, to convince you of my opinions, to draw you closer to me. I was assiduous to smooth away practical difficulties. You came - how happy I was! And yet, how unhappy! For you had not come to me, to share joy and sorrow with me as I was, but to a Wagner whom you believed was about to compose an opera for Paris. You were ashamed to say in Dresden that you were going to join me in Switzerland. Instead you gave out that you were going to Paris and that your husband had, as apparently you believed yourself, a signed contract already in his pocket. Oh, the gulf of misunderstanding between us two was bound to be revealed more and more day by day! All my views and thoughts shocked you, you loathed my writings, though I tried to make it clear to you that they were more necessary to me now than a lot of useless opera writing. You defended all the people with whom I was not like-minded, you condemned all who were like-minded with me. In short, at last I felt infinitely lonely beside you, for I saw it was impossible to win you to me.
Your letter has now wrecked everything. There you stand before me irreconcilable. What can my love be now? Only the wish to repay you for your youth wasted on me, for the misery you suffered with me, to make you happy. Can I hope to attain this now by living with you? Impossible!
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 173