[562W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 307-308]
[P. 307] {FEUER} “The figure of the ‘Flying Dutchman’ is a mythical creation of the Folk: a primal trait of human nature speaks out from it with heart-enthralling force. This trait, in its most universal meaning, is the longing after rest from amid the storms of life. (…) The Christian, without a home on earth, embodied this trait in the figure of the ‘Wandering Jew’: for that wanderer, forever doomed to a long-since outlived life, without an aim, without a joy, there bloomed no earthly ransom; death was the sole remaining goal of all his strivings; his only hope, the laying-down of being. At the close of the Middle Ages a new, more active impulse led the nations to fresh life: in the world-historical direction its most important result was the bent to voyages of discovery. (…) [P. 308] Like Ahasuerus, he [the “Hollandic Mariner”] yearns for his sufferings to be ended by Death; the Dutchman, however, may gain this redemption, denied to the undying Jew, at the hands of – a Woman who, of very love, shall sacrifice herself for him. This yearning for death thus spurs him on to seek this woman; but she is no longer the home tending Penelope of Ulysses, as courted in days of old, but the quintessence of womankind; and yet the still unmanifest, the longed-for, the dreamt-of, the infinitely womanly Woman, -- …: the Woman of the Future.… this was the first Folk’s-poem that forced its way into my heart, and called on me as man and artist to point its meaning, and mould it in a work of art.
{FEUER} From here begins my career as a poet, and my farewell to the mere concoctor of opera-texts.“ [562W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 307-308]
[563W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 329]
[P. 329] “Just as a jovial Satyr-play was wont at Athens to follow on the Tragedy, so … there suddenly occurred to me the picture of a comic piece which well might form a Satyr-play as pendant to my ‘Sangerkrieg auf Wartburg’ (i.e. Tannhaeuser). This was ‘The Meistersingers of Nuremberg,’ with Hans Sachs at their head. I took Hans Sachs as the last manifestation of the art-productive spirit of the Folk (Volksgeist), and set him, in this sense, in contrast to the pettifogging bombast of the other Meistersingers; to whose absurd pedanticism, of tabulatur and prosody, I gave a concrete personal expression in the figure of the ‘Marker.’ “ [563W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 329]
[564W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 333-334]
[P. 333] {FEUER} “The medieval poem presented Lohengrin in a mystic twilightthat filled me with suspicion … . Only when the immediate impression of this reading had faded, did the shape of Lohengrin rise repeatedly, and with growing power of attraction, before my soul; and this power gathered fresh force to itself from outside, chiefly by reason that I learnt to know the myth of Lohengrin in its simple traits, and alike its deeper meaning, as the genuine poem of the Folk, such as it has been laid bare to us by the discoveries of the newer searchers into Saga lore. After I had thus seen it as a noble poem of man’s yearning and his longing – by no means merely seeded from the Christian’s bent toward supernaturalism, but from the truest depths of universal human nature. (…)
