Wolfgang Mende, From the Workshop of a Mythmaker: Wagner’s Ideology of Inspiration and the Evidence of the Sketches

March 2023, Volume 17, Number 1, 4–21.

Whoever desires to reconstruct the creative process of a composer will find what seems at first glance to be a state of paradise in the case of Richard Wagner. He was a master of self-dramatisation, and in his eagerness to communicate his thoughts through his writings, letters and autobiographical documents he has few equals among his composing colleagues of the 19th century. What’s more, it was also Wagner’s custom to preserve documents carefully even when they were not intended for the eyes of the public.