outward acts engendered on the surface of those depths: but never can he take you down into them, unveil them to your look. It is reserved for Music alone, to reveal the primal elements of this marvellous nature; in her mysterious charm our soul is shown this great, unutterable secret.” [356W-{2-4/42} Halevy and La Reine De Chypre: PW Vol. VIII, p. 179]
[357W-{1/30/44}Letter to Karl Gaillard: SLRW, p. 118]
[P. 118] If it is the task of today’s dramatic poet to elucidate & intellectualize the material interests of our age from a moralistic point of view, so it falls to the opera librettist and composer to conjure up the unique and characteristic aura of sanctity associated with poetry as it wafts across the centuries in the form of legends and tales from the dawn of history; for music offers us the means to forge links which the poet alone does not have at his command, at least when faced with today’s actors. [357W-{1/30/44}Letter to Karl Gaillard: SLRW, p. 118]
[358W-{8/4/45}Letter to Albert Wagner: SLRW, p. 124]
[P. 124] “I feel very fortunate to have satisfied my desire to rescue what by now is an almost unrecognizable legend from the rubble & decay to which the medieval poet had reduced the poem as a result of his inferior & prosaic treatment of it, & to have restored it to its rich & highly poetical potential by dint of my own inventiveness & reworking of it.” [358W-{8/4/45}Letter to Albert Wagner: SLRW, p. 124]
[359W-{3-6/46} On The Performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Dresden: Programme: PW Vol. VII, p. 251-252
[P. 251] “With this opening of the last movement Beethoven’s music takes on a more definitely speaking character: it quits the mould of purely instrumental music, observed in all the three preceding movements, the mode of infinite, indefinite expression; the musical poem is urging toward [P. 252] a crisis, a crisis only to be voiced in human speech.” [359W-{3-6/46} On The Performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Dresden: Programme: PW Vol. VII, p. 251-252]
[360W-{3-6/46} On The Performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Dresden: Programme: PW Vol. VII, p. 251]
[P. 251] {Pre-SCHOP} [Wagner’s Footnote]:* [Tieck, regarding the character of Instrumental music from his own standpoint, was moved to the following dictum: ‘At deepest bottom of these Symphonies we hear insatiate Desire forever hieing forth and turning back into itself, that unspeakable longing which nowhere finds fulfilment and throws itself in wasting passion on the stream of madness, battles with every tone, now overwhelmed, now conquering shouts from out the waves, and seeking rescue sinks still deeper.’] [360W-{3-6/46} On The Performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Dresden: Programme: PW Vol. VII, p. 251]
[361W-{5/30/46}Letter to Hermann Franck: SLRW, p. 129-130]
[P. 129] {FEUER} The symbolic meaning of the tale [Lohengrin] I can best sum up as follows: contact between a metaphysical phenomenon and human nature, and the [P. 130] impossibility that
