Goethe's Faust was profoundly important for Richard Wagner. He knew of it as a young boy and read it as a teenager; he composed songs, ‘Seven Compositions on Goethe's Faust’ (1829–30), probably in conjunction with the appearance of his sister, Rosalie, as Gretchen, in the first Leipzig production. Wagner suppressed these student works; they were first published posthumously. Unlike numerous contemporaries, Wagner never attempted an operatic or oratorical setting of the play; his single mature work on Faust, A Faust Overture, is seldom performed. Its composition and early reception, however, bear witness to its significance for Wagner as work and as subject matter. Its reception history documents its contribution to the development of programmatic orchestral music and the midcentury debates about it, and its place in the critical discourse on the play. And the many commentaries by Wagner on Faust and Goethe express his continuing, not uncritical fascination with the play and its author.

The Faust Overture: ‘Urfaust’ (1840) and Revision (1855)

Wagner composed a symphonic movement in d minor in December 1839 to January 1840 in Paris, as the first movement of a planned ‘Faust’ Symphony. He sketched a ‘Gretchen’ theme (manuscript entry) for a second movement, but then abandoned the idea of a symphony, writing to Meyerbeer of an ‘Ouvertüre, Faust, erster Teil’. With Meyerbeer's help a performance was arranged in February 1841, but Wagner decided instead on an earlier work, the overture ‘Columbus’. Wagner's hope for a rehearsal performance by the Paris Conservatory Orchestra was not realized.

The movement is in sonata form, with a weighty slow introduction and an extensive coda. The introduction begins by stating a rhetorically weighty rhythmic-melodic ‘Grundgestalt’ (bars 1–5) that underlies the initial ideas of both thematic-tonal groups in the sonata movement (bars 34ff and 120ff, respectively) and frequently appears in thematic extensions and developmental sections. Moreover, the incipits of these themes are first stated in the introduction (bars 10–12 and 21–23 respectively), which presents several other important motivicrhythmic ideas (e.g. the sixteenth-note groups first heard in bar 5).

Felix Mendelssohn's efforts to reform the performance style of early music (notably Handel oratorios) have received only some of the attention they rightfully claim: in 1969 Susanna Grossmann-Vendrey touched on the subject in her book on Mendelssohn and historical music; in the 1990s I published a short essay on his Handel performances at the Lower Rhine music festivals against the backdrop of eighteenth-century performance traditions (Mozart's arrangements of Handel) and their discussion in the musical press; and in 2008 Ralf Wehner presented the most detailed discussion of Mendelssohn's Handel performances to date. In this study I will broaden the focus by placing Mendelssohn's work as well as the contemporary debate on arrangements of historical music—Handel was the focus—in their cultural-historical context and by examining comparable developments in architecture, the visual arts, and literature.

Our appreciation of the singularity, in his time and for many decades thereafter, of Mendelssohn's vision of a historically correct performance style should not obscure the fact that his reforms, and the aesthetic and cultural-historical perspective that informed them, comprised just one current in a broad stream of cultural historicism that stimulated efforts in Germany and in other, primarily northern European, countries to preserve art and literature of the past and to make it available and understandable to a modern public. The alternatives for translators that Friedrich Schleiermacher proposed in the passage cited above establish, perhaps over-reductively, the antipodes framing the field of divergent perspectives and practices about unfamiliar music, literature, and the visual arts. Because they can be applied, in their general form, not only to literature, but rather to all these areas, they also provide something of a unifying conceptual field for my topic, which lends some measure of methodological integrity to the difficult task of discussing very different artistic media. However different their materials and forms were, artists and theorists in all these areas were faced with the same problem: how to preserve and present old and unfamiliar, even foreign artifacts to the contemporary recipient.

The long road to Parsifal

The Ring complete, the Bayreuth festival a fragile reality, Wagner turned – or more precisely returned, after a long hiatus – to work on Parsifal in 1877. He finished the poetic text in April and then labored for five years on the music, fighting ill health and struggling to ensure the future of the festival along the way. He composed act by act, drafting “compositional” and “orchestral” sketches virtually simultaneously, sometimes making use of material conceived earlier and occasionally revising the verbal text. After finishing the orchestral sketch in April 1879, Wagner needed almost three years until he concluded work on the full score, in January 1882. Further revisions and rehearsals fraught with diverse problems preceded the first performances in the summer of 1882, when the aging master celebrated himself and his achievement by conducting the last act of the final performance – a true Schwanengesang.

The opera Parsifal is a “summation and consummation,” a late work and Wagner's self-described “last card.” He drew it from a very mixed deck that he had begun to assemble already in the 1840s. In the intervening decades he completed an intellectual and artistic journey whose course was defined by the many twists and turns, detours and reversals, through which the opera accrued a rich assortment of philosophical ideas and poetic-dramatic and musical elements. If Wagner had composed a “Parzifal” on Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval epic in 1845, when he first read the poem, it would have joined Tannhäuser and Lohengrin to form a trilogy of Romantic operas on medieval Christian legends.