The passage I have just quoted from Wagner's letter to his sister Clara has been suppressed in the German edition of the Familienbriefe (p. 218). Mr. Ashton Ellis, in his English version (Family Letters of Richard Wagner, p. 215), opines that Glasenapp, the German editor of the Familienbriefe, omitted the passage in compliance "with Wahnfried wishes." It is one more evidence of the utter untrustworthiness of the Wahnfried coterie. The letter was originally published in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1902. A complete English version of it will be found in the opening of Mr. Ellis' translation of the Wagner-Wesendonck correspondence. The German of the passage quoted above is given in Kapp's Richard Wagner und die Frauen, pp. 116, 117.
[166] I am well aware that he filled his letters with moanings about his "renunciation" and "resignation." But the words were little more than resounding literary counters for him, helping him to some of the best of his epistolary effects.
[167] Mein Leben, p. 654.
[168] Mein Leben, p. 667. In his Venice diary of September 18, 1858 (after his flight from the Asyl) he reminds her how she has placed her arm round him and declared that she loved him. See also under 12th October. On 1 January 1859 he speaks with ardent recollection of her caresses. On 1 November 1858 he tells her how sweet it would be "to die in her arms." If we are to die in the arms of all the women with whom our relations have been "merely friendly" we shall all of us need more lives than a cat.
[169] Mein Leben, pp. 658, 659.
[170] Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck, p. 45. In the same winter he set to music the "Five Poems" of Mathilde.
[171] Kapp, Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p. 119.
[172] Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, ii. 184. This letter was omitted from the first issue of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence, and consequently will not be found in the English edition.
[173] Also published for the first time in the expanded edition (1910).
[174] Ibid., ii. 186.