Wagner On The Evolution Of His Sme

Abstract

Abstract Among Wagner’s writings in mid-career (see p. 201 below), A Communication to My Friends (1851) stands out as retrospective, a summing up, more than a program for the future. It served in fact as a preface to the publication in book form of the texts of the last of his early operas, Der f/iegende Hollander (1843), Tannhauser (1845), and Lohengrin (1848). Wagner himself furnished the reason for this Communication: he wished to explain the apparent contradiction between the style of his early works and the dramatic theories he had been propounding lately. In the following excerpt he looks back at his very first operas, Die Feen (1834, after a fable by Carlo Gozzi), Das Liebesverbot (1836, after Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure), and at Rienzi (1840, after the novel by Bulwer-Lytton), the work that actually launched his career. He was from the first his own librettist, and in discussing the operas that followed (the three whose text he was now publishing in book form), he goes into some depth as he analyzes his dual role as both poet and composer of his operas. It is in the reciprocal influence of those two functions that he finds the driving force behind his unique stylistic development, one that took him from his frankly imitative youthful operas to the increasingly unconventional works of the 1840s, culminating in Lohengrin.