Mission

The mission of The Wagner Library is:

• to provide an online edition of as much as possible public domain works of Richard Wagner in english. These include:
  • his prose works
  • his correspondence
  • his libretti (in german only)
• to provide related information, like
  • articles from Wagner's period
  • Wagner's sources
  • Writings of other authors about Richard Wagner
• to provide a TEI-XML encoded version, so that extensive cross-referencing and document analysis is possible
• to provide reading tracks through the vast material presented in the library

By accomplishing this with the necessary quality, The Wagner Library will be the primary reference on Richard Wagner's prose works and related information.

The Prose Writings

Why should you be bothered with reading Richard Wagner's prose writings? Here are some quotes that might give you the answer:

• From the Wagner Handbook, Chapter 23, Harvard University Press, 1992.

  "Richard Wagner heads a long line, which continues into the present day, of composers who are also active as authors, and whose writings are not restricted to questions of musical aesthetics but which also address political, contemporary, and philosophical issues. Wagner's writings are in addition a source, as yet far from exhausted, of insight into his musical and dramatic oeuvre. Moreover, the aesthetic writings of his Zurich years represent an important and thoroughly original contribution to discussions of the philosophy of art—particularly literary and musical theory—in the nineteenth century."

• From the cover text of Thomas S. Grey's Wagner's Musical Prose, Cambridge University Press, 1995

  "As a by-product of Wagner's many-faceted career as composer, conductor, cultural critic, and controversial ideologue, his writings are documents of undisputed interpretive value, despite their notoriously problematic style."

Some quotes from Wagner himself, and demonstrating his "notoriously problematic style" at the same time:

• From A Communication to my Friends.

  "If the severance of the Artist from the Man is as brainless an attempt as the divorce of soul from body, and if it be a stable truth that never was an Artist loved nor his art comprehended, unless he was also loved—at least unwittingly—as Man, and with his art his life was also understood: then at the present moment less than ever, and amid the hopeless desolation of our public art-affairs, can an artist of my endeavour be loved, and thus his art be understood, if this understanding and that love which makes it possible be not above all grounded upon sympathy, i.e. upon a fellow-pain and fellow-feeling with the veriest human aspect of his life.
  
  Least of all, however, can I deem those to be my friends who, led by impressions gathered from an incomplete acquaintance with my artistic doings, transfer the nebulous uncertainty of this their understanding to the artistic object itself, and ascribe to a peculiarity of the latter that which finds its only origin in their own confusion of mind."

• From the dedication in Opera and Drama.

  "There seems to have arisen, among certain folk to whom I was utterly indifferent as poet or musician, an interest in the task of searching my writings, of which one had heard all kinds of curious things, for dangerous remarks on politics and religion."