No one any longer denies the immense significance of Wagner’s musical-dramatic achievement, even if they find it repellent. But his reputation as a writer — of operatic texts, autobiographical and biographical memoirs, practical essays on how to conduct particular pieces, vast and less vast theoretical works, ranging from speculations on opera and climate to theologico-political musings — is not high. Nor should it be, except for the more ‘occasional’ pieces.
He was in fact a major contributor to mauvaises lettres, and no kind of systematic thinker, however much he might have liked to be. His only prose that is consistently readable comes in his letters, some of them enormous, all of them full of life and colour. Many of the 12,000 he is known to have written survive, still being edited in the German edition. His complete prose works have been translated into English only once, by the dauntless and mad William Ashton Ellis, and although everyone who mentions Ellis’s work rightly deplores it, no one can face the prospect of doing the job again. Shorter essays and stories, occasional pieces such as his essay on Beethoven (recently and admirably edited and translated by Roger Allen), are all that we can hope for, or should feel the need of. The relationship between his ‘thought’ and his operatic practice is as wayward and dubious as it is in the case of any major artist.
When it comes to the texts for his dramas, the situation is quite different. His own estimate of his poetic gifts varied, but he was, with very small exceptions, a consummate dramatist. When one contemplates the four-part drama of Der Ring des Nibelungen, for instance, and compares it to the multifarious sources in Teutonic and Nordic myth and legend from which he extracted and remade it, no degree of admiration is adequate.
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