This month marks the hundredth year since Wagner’s death, the start of a centennial celebration that will have opera houses, concert halls, and broadcast facilities throughout the world resounding with his works. Paralleling these sonic observances will be an activity that has become an adjunct to realizing the music, to wit, the writing of words. Innumerable millions of words have already explained, attacked, and defended Wagner’s life and works for a century and a half, and the flood of utterance is sure to continue unabated this year with an abundant production of commemorative volumes, magazine articles, program books, and liner notes, to which should be added the centenary output of conferences, speeches, and seminars, all apparently welcome to a never satiated public appetite for writing on Wagner.
This verbal torrent began with Wagner himself, whose loquacity in person was well complemented by an unending prolificity in print: his prose and verse fill sixteen volumes in the popular German edition. But Wagner’s own words constitute a mere rivulet compared to the roaring ocean of verbiage that streamed from the presses in the composer’s lifetime. Thousands of volumes and pamphlets dealing with the Wagnerian phenomenon crammed the bookshops of Europe, an accumulation of reading matter devoted to a single person that is said to be unrivaled, save for the bibliographies associated with the names of Jesus and Napoleon.
It is with an awareness then of these veritable libraries of volumes, which have amassed around a man who happened to
