Life and Work in Dates and Pictures [antikvár]

Moving Towards a New Image of Wagner The number and extent of existing documents about Richard Wagner is great. We know a lot about Wagner, but at the same time we are far from knowing everything which can be known in view of the wealth of evidence which has been handed down. While with other composers the shortage of rehable facts leads to speculation, in the case of Wagner the unmanageable quantity of documents and the facts contained in them has the same effect. It is extraordinarily difficult to achieve a survey worthy of the name and then to preserve it without drowning in the flood of facts; for neither are all the documents concerning Wagner assembled in full, nor are they arranged in chronological or systematic order and published with appropriate commentaries, in other words, generally available, as in the case of Bach, Mozart or Franz Schubert. It is barely ten years since some determined attempts have been made to compensate for this deficit. These include the editions of the "Collected Letters" and "Collected Works" (which for the time being includes only the musical ones) as well as a comprehensive "Index of Works and Sources", to be published shortly, and the documentation of the image of Wagner presented by the Press of his day. The publication dates of some important documents show the difficulties experienced in gaining access to the sources of Wagner's biography in the past. Wagner's autobiography "Mein Leben" (My Life) appeared in the original version only in 1963 and Cosima Wagner's Diaries could not be pubhshed until 1976/77. What has naturally contributed most of all to the amount we know about Wagner, and to the occasional impression that we know everything, is the fact that Wagner himself reported in