Mystical Wagner
Richard Wagner as mystic, visionary, spiritual transformer
Discover the music and mysticism of Richard Wagner. Experience Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal and more through interactive librettos pairing new English translations with great recordings, uniting word and tone to reveal the deeper meaning of the dramas. Explore Wagner’s prose and letters, Cosima’s diaries, and 150 years of scholarship to uncover the philosophical and spiritual vision at the heart of his works.
Featured · Interactive translation
Tristan und Isolde
Act 2: The Love Duet, “Isolde! Geliebte! … Tristan! Geliebter!”
The night of the Love Duet in a new English translation, synchronised word by word to the recording. The sung line lights up and scrolls in time with the voices; click any line to go straight to it. The English keeps Wagner’s Stabreim and rhyme and sets its stresses where the music stresses them, so that word and tone arrive together.
Dim the lights, enter fullscreen, and let the drama unfold in darkness.
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Explore the Archive
Everything gathered here, to read, to hear, and to check the work against
Hear
Interactive Librettos
Scenes from Tristan, the Ring, Die Meistersinger and Parsifal in new English translations, each synchronised to a recording, with the text highlighting as it is sung.
7 scenes Browse
Read
Prose Works
Wagner’s essays and treatises in overview, each summarised and linked to W. Ashton Ellis’s translation.
47 works Browse
Research
Scholarship
A directory of Wagner scholars, critics and interpreters, sorted into interpretive registers: a map of the critical terrain rather than a bibliography.
101 scholars Browse
Documents
Cosima’s Diaries
Cosima Wagner’s daily record of life with Wagner from 1869 to his death in 1883, browsable by month and fully searchable.
4,733 entries Browse
Documents
Letters
Correspondence by, to and around Wagner, from patrons, friends, lovers and creditors: Liszt, Mathilde Wesendonck, Minna Wagner, King Ludwig and others.
2,995 letters Browse
Why Mystical Wagner?
Wagner did not write his mature dramas as entertainments. He meant them as encounters with the deepest questions of existence, and he wrote them steeped in Schopenhauer, the Upanishads, early Buddhism and the Christian mystics.
Mystical Wagner reads them in that light, taking mystical in its older and exacting sense: the disciplined inward path of Meister Eckhart, Rūmī and the Vedānta toward direct knowledge of the Absolute. Not occultism and not easy comfort, but a serious philosophical inheritance, grounded in texts and open to scholarly scrutiny.
Four mature dramas trace a single pilgrimage of the spirit, a fourfold path from revelation to redemption.
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Tristan und Isolde
Revelation
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The Ring
Revolution
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Die Meistersinger
Restoration
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Parsifal
Redemption
Recent Additions
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Libretto
The Love Duet in three recordings
The Act 2 Love Duet from Tristan und Isolde can now be followed with Barenboim (1995), Furtwängler (1952) or Böhm (1966), switching between them from the playback bar.
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Documents
Wagner’s letters
Some three thousand letters by, to and around Wagner, arranged by date and browsable by correspondent, from Minna Wagner and Liszt to Mathilde Wesendonck and Hans von Bülow.
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Scholarship
A map of Wagner scholarship
More than a hundred scholars, critics and interpreters, sorted into interpretive registers: who argues what, against whom, and on what grounds.