Letter of Richard Wagner to Arrigo Boito on the production of "Lohengrin" at Bologna

«I was so deeply touched by the gratifying reports from so many quarters about the production of my Lohengrin in Bologna, that I shall take advantage of your knowledge of German to ask you to convey in your mother-tongue my heartfelt thanks to your honoured countrymen. Perhaps I was not mistaken in resisting the repeated invitations to attend that production; by standing aside from the rehearsals of my work I put myself, and all those who joined in this undertaking, in a position to clearly judge the mutual relations of all the forces coming into play. As everything here was due to the spontaneous impulse of Italian art-lovers, and nothing to my own initiative, I may have wished to leave the issue entirely up to the character in which my work was read and executed by your fellow-countrymen. In this way its success could be an entirely free expression of Italian artistic taste. I confess that in my decision to remain away I had to struggle with a truly great temptation. What that temptation was you will be astonished to learn, if I tell you my experiences with this very Lohengrin in Germany. You must hear that all the successes this work won on the German stage never secured me a performance according to my directions. My offers to contribute to a thoroughly correct performance were eluded by all, and I only met with indifference when I pointed out that some of the most important features of my musico-dramatic poem, such as the crisis in the second act, were not even made intelligible on the stage. Folk stuck to a couple of orchestral preludes, a chorus, a "cavatina", and thought that was enough, since after all the opera pleased. Once only, in Munich, did I succeed in rehearsing my work according to my intentions, at least as regards its rhythmic architecture: those who attended the resultant performances with true feeling and understanding were astonished at one thing alone – namely, that it was indifferent to the public whether it had its Lohengrin thus or otherwise; if later the opera was presented in the old routine, it made the same impression – a most comforting experience for the Director of the theatre, but which necessarily made me highly indifferent to any dealings with the German audience. From many examples I now know that with an Italian audience, in such a case, I would have met with a very different degree of receptivity. Although, in a talk I had with him twelve years ago, Rossini blamed his countrymen’s effeminate artistic taste for the manner he had adopted in his music, his words by no means allow us to conclude that the Italians would be insensitive to nobler things when offered them. Besides, after hearing about the impression made by Beethoven’s music on Bellini – who before his stay in Paris had never heard a note of it – I have taken every opportunity to observe the Italian attitude to art, and gained the most favourable opinion of its one main characteristic: an open mind and delicate feeling in all artistic questions. And so, going beyond the singular castrato-singing and pirouetting century of Italian decadence, I understood again the incomparably productive spirit to which the new world owes all its Art since the Renaissance. I told you how tempted I was to appeal in person to this open-minded instinct of your countrymen, so as to enjoy for once the satisfaction of seeing a tenderly-prepared creation regarded and accepted with an equally tender feeling. A peculiar fate has repeatedly kept me from following in the footsteps of Goethe, who lamented, on his visit to Italy, that he must torture his poetic Muse with the German tongue, when the Italian would so sweetly smooth her task. What drove Goethe back to our Northern climes, with sighs and deep regret, certainly cannot be wholly explained by his personal ties. If at various times I, too, have sought a second home in Italy, what always drove me back again was easier to explain; yet it would be difficult for me, my honoured friend, to name it to you. Perhaps I may best suggest it by saying that I no longer heard the naïve folk-song Goethe heard upon the streets, but in its place the workman on his homeward way at night would vent those mawkish and affected opera-phrases which I cannot believe were engendered by the manly spirit of your nation – or ever by the womanly! Yet even this might be ascribed to illness and a morbid mood. What made my ear so sensitive in Italy may certainly lie deeper. Be it a good or evil genius that rules us in our hours of crisis – enough: lying sleepless in a hostelry of La Spezzia [sic], to me there came the prompting of my music for the Rheingold; I returned at once to the land of shadow, to carry out that huge work whose fate, above all else, now binds me to Germany. It has been said that the ground of a nation’s original productiveness is less to be sought in what Nature lavishly bestowed, than in what she doled out to it. From a physiological point of view, the fact that in the past hundred years the Germans have acquired such an exceptional influence over the development of Music, which they took up from the Italians, may be partly explained by their lacking the temptations attached to a naturally melodious voice, thus being compelled to treat the art of Tone with somewhat the same soul-searching earnestness as their Reformers the religion of the Holy Gospels – a religion they recognised as not consisting in the pomp and glamour of church ceremonies, in the intoxicating sheen of colours beneath a smiling sky, but in its serious promises of comfort to the human soul oppressed by all kinds of deprivations. If this necessarily led us to an idealistic explanation of the world, it also preserved us from the effeminacy of an overly realistic yielding to it. Rather than beautiful, Music thus became a more sublime art with us; and the magical effect of this sublimity upon the mind is surely great, for none whose heart has been pierced by it has submitted to the seductions of more sensuous beauty. But we have still one longing, which warns us that we do not embrace the whole essence of Art. The artwork wills to become in the end a full and physical deed; it wills to seize the human being by his every fibre of sensation, to flood him with a river of joy. It has been proved that the womb of German mothers could receive and bear the loftiest geniuses of the world; what remains to prove, is whether the receptive organs of the German Folk are worthy of the noble issue of those chosen mothers. Perhaps here a new marriage of the genii of nations is needed. For us Germans there could loom no fairer love-match, than a wedding of Italia’s genius with that of Deutschland. Should my poor Lohengrin have proved the groomsman, his deed of love would be a glorious one. The great, the truly touching zeal my Italian friends have devoted to the transference of this my work, a zeal my long experience teaches me to value to its utmost, might well awake in me that lofty hope. By my almost extravagant omen you may judge the importance I attach to this event, and how highly I prize the services of those artists and other friends of art to whom I owe that elating success. Richard Wagner».