Richard Wagner, Bellini’s ‘Norma’, translated by Stewart Spencer

Unpublished until 1973 and therefore not included in any edition of Wagner’s prose writings, the present essay was inspired by a performance of Bellini’s Norma in Königsberg on 8 March 1837. The review was seen by Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, who refers to it in the third and fourth editions of his life of Wagner and who suggested that it may have been written ‘as a favour’ or ‘in the general interest of the Königsberg Theatre’, a suggestion repeated by Friedrich Lippmann in 1973. For reasons that may become clearer in a moment, this hypothesis seems unlikely.