Richard Wagner’s Open Letter to Marie Wittgenstein on Liszt’s Symphonic Poems, introduced, edited and translated by Thomas S. Grey

March 2011, Volume 5, Number 1, 65–81.

Almost from the moment Wagner was forced to flee Dresden as a political exile in May 1849 through most of the subsequent years of exile in Switzerland, Franz Liszt served him as an essential lifeline in matters personal, financial and artistic. Liszt helped to arrange Wagner’s safe exit from Germany to Paris and Zurich, while his immediate comrades in revolution faced sentences of death or life imprisonment. At the very same time Liszt was in the midst of mounting a production of Tannhäuser in Weimar, where a year later he would oversee the world premiere of Lohengrin. For a while, both composers harboured dreams of becoming the musical Goethe and Schiller of a new cultural golden age at the Weimar court.