Richard Wagner, Observations on Today’s German Opera Scene, translated by Niall Hoskin

July 2021, Volume 15, Number 2, 39–53.

In his essay ‘On Actors and Singers’ (1872) Wagner described the kind of performer he needed for the ‘Ring’: not a conventional opera singer, however technically efficient they may be, but essentially a ‘singing actor’ able to respond truthfully to the demands of his text. No sooner had the essay been published than Wagner and his wife Cosima set off on a tour of German theatres to try to find a team of such singers. His report on the first of two journeys, that undertaken between 10 November and 15 December 1872, published in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt in January 1873 under the title ‘Ein Einblick in das heutige deutsche Opernwesen’, appears below in a new translation.