Glossary

The concepts of Wagner’s theoretical writings

The ideas that run through Wagner’s essays, letters and dramas, from the Gesamtkunstwerk and “endless melody” to Wahn, compassion and the denial of the will, each with a short explanation of what Wagner meant by it or how it involves his artwork. Most of the concepts are taken from the Wagner-Lexikon of 1883, the first dictionary of Wagner’s thought.

Showing all concepts (160 total)
Concept Explanation
Abendmahl und Gral (Eucharist and the Grail) The Grail ceremonies in Parsifal draw on the Christian Eucharist, associating bread, wine, and the sacred vessel with Christ's self-giving and the nourishment of a community. Their dramatic meaning also depends on the condition of those who celebrate them, since Amfortas experiences the ceremony through his unhealed suffering. The final restoration links sacred ritual with compassion, healing, and renewed responsibility for others.
Absolute Musik (Absolute music) Absolute music is music understood as independent of words, drama, and visible action. Wagner challenges this independence by arguing that even instrumental music takes its forms from bodily movement, dance, or speech, while acknowledging music's exceptional expressive power.
Ahnung (Intimation) An intimation is an emerging feeling whose object or meaning has not yet become definite. The orchestra can communicate it before a character speaks or acts, allowing the audience to sense what is preparing to take shape in the drama.
Anschauung (Intuitive perception) Anschauung is a direct apprehension of something in a concrete or inwardly perceived form. It enables the artist to grasp a living image or relationship before translating it into explicit concepts or a finished work.
Arie (Aria) The aria is the absolutely musical form on which opera was built. In Opera and Drama, Wagner calls it the folk-song as rendered by the art-singer before the world of rank, with its poem replaced by the work of an art-poet. He compares it to a fragrance distilled from a flower by the man of luxury. Its root character remains musical whatever words it sets, so it became a platform for vocal display.
Ausdruck (Expression) Expression is the means by which an inward feeling or intention becomes perceptible to others. Wagner's dramatic ideal joins words, music, and gesture so that their combined expression communicates the full significance of a situation.
Bedürfnis (Need) Genuine need is the inward demand from which necessary action and authentic creation arise. Wagner contrasts it with artificial wants generated by luxury, fashion, and the pursuit of status.
Bewusstsein und Unbewusstsein (Consciousness and the unconscious) Wagner sees much of life and artistic creation as arising from impulses that operate before deliberate reflection. Conscious understanding should recognize and clarify these living sources, while artistic technique gives their discoveries a communicable form.
Bühnenfestspiel (Stage festival play) Wagner gives this designation to the Ring, organized as a preliminary evening followed by three dramatic days. The term presents the cycle as a concentrated festival undertaking whose four parts form one large artistic experience, requiring performance conditions suited to their continuity and scale.
Bühnenweihfestspiel (Festival play for the consecration of the stage) This is Wagner's designation for Parsifal, emphasizing its ceremonial character and the special seriousness of its performance. The consecration concerns the stage as a place set apart for an artistic and spiritual experience in which compassion, suffering, and renewal become perceptible through drama and music.
Christentum (Christianity) Wagner interprets the heart of Christianity through Christ's compassion, self-giving love, and overcoming of worldly egoism. He distinguishes this spiritual core from the institutions and dogmatic elaborations of historical Christianity, which he often criticizes.
Christentum und Buddhismus (Christianity and Buddhism) Wagner finds affinities between Christianity and Buddhism in their attention to suffering, compassion, renunciation, and liberation from selfish desire. He interprets these affinities through Schopenhauer and the nineteenth-century accounts of Asian religions available to him. They inform his religious imagination, especially in Parsifal, without making the two traditions identical.
Christi Leiden (Christ's suffering) Wagner interprets Christ's suffering as an inward sharing in the anguish of living beings, extending beyond the physical pain of the Crucifixion. In Parsifal, the hero's recognition of Amfortas's wound dramatizes a comparable passage from witnessing pain to experiencing another's suffering as his own.
Das Göttliche (Divine) Wagner associates the divine with liberation from suffering and with the mysterious transformation of self-seeking will into the desire for redemption. He suggests that this reality is disclosed through compassion and the overcoming of the will more readily than through positive conceptual definitions.
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (Artwork of the future) This is Wagner's vision of a communal dramatic art in which the separate arts recover their unity. It also requires a transformed society, so that artistic creation expresses shared human needs rather than serving luxury, commercial demand, or professional self-interest.
Das Männliche und das Weibliche (The manly and the womanly) The manly and the womanly are the gendered terms in which Wagner describes the union of poetry and music. In Opera and Drama, he declares that “Music is a woman”: she bears, the poet begets, and the poetic intention is the seed she receives and brings forth as melody.
Das Reinmenschliche (Universal humanity) The purely human is what remains essential in human experience beneath changing conventions, institutions, and historical circumstances. Wagner seeks it in myth and dramatic relationships that make fundamental motives directly accessible to feeling.
Das Unaussprechliche (Ineffable) The ineffable is what cannot be adequately expressed in the language of concepts and ordinary speech. Wagner maintains that music can communicate this content distinctly through its own expressive means, giving audible form to what the poet leaves unspoken.
Der deutsche Geist (German spirit) Wagner imagines a distinctive German cultural vocation expressed through poetry, philosophy, and music, with a particular capacity for inwardness and artistic seriousness. This is an idealized nationalist construction within his thought, and his claims for its universal mission coexist with exclusionary judgments about other peoples.
Der schöne Mensch (Beautiful human being) In Wagner's early artistic ideal, the living human being is the central subject and expressive presence of the dramatic artwork. Voice, bodily movement, gesture, and feeling cooperate in the performer, giving the reunited arts a concrete human form.
Dichterisch-musikalische Periode (Poetic-musical period) In Opera and Drama, this is a proposed unit in which the emotional movement of a passage of verse shapes its musical development. Contrasts among words can prompt harmonic modulation, while their larger relationship helps bind the passage into a coherent whole. The concept belongs to Wagner's search for musical form generated by dramatic speech.
Dichterische Absicht (Poetic intention) The poetic intention is the dramatic meaning that the artist seeks to embody in a work. Especially in Wagner's earlier theory, it guides the choice and organization of musical and theatrical means so that the audience experiences this meaning through feeling.
Dichtkunst (Poetry) Poetry shapes experience into significant images, words, and actions, making an artistic intention conscious and communicable. Wagner considers its fullest dramatic realization inseparable from performance and from the expressive resources of music and gesture.
Dirigieren und Tempo (Conducting and tempo) Wagner regards an understanding of melodic phrasing and musical character as essential to choosing and sustaining the right tempo. Expressive modifications of pace should clarify changes of feeling and the relationships between passages. Such flexibility requires judgment about continuity and proportion, so that individual moments contribute to the work's coherence.
Dogma (Dogma) Dogma gives religious insight a formulation that can be communicated and believed by others. Wagner argues that this process can distort the original insight, especially when its allegorical expressions are treated as literal facts.
Drama (Drama) Drama communicates human motives through living action, making what might otherwise remain an abstract idea directly intelligible to feeling. Wagner treats it as the meeting point of the arts and, in his later account, as the visible embodiment of an inner reality expressed by music.
Dramatische Melodie (Dramatic melody) Dramatic melody grows from the expressive needs of a character's words and situation. Its rhythm, phrasing, and harmonic movement serve the developing emotion, allowing speech to become song without losing dramatic meaning.
Durch Mitleid wissend (Knowing through compassion) In Parsifal, decisive knowledge comes through sharing another's suffering deeply enough to understand what had previously remained obscure. Kundry's kiss awakens Parsifal to the anguish behind Amfortas's wound and turns his awareness into a responsibility to heal. Compassion thus becomes a means of insight as well as a motive for ethical action.
Effekt (Artistic effect) Wagner uses this term critically for an impressive theatrical or musical result that lacks a convincing dramatic cause. An effect becomes artistically empty when spectacle, virtuosity, or excitement replaces the necessary expression of a character or situation.
Egoismus (Egoism) Egoism becomes destructive when personal advantage is treated as the governing principle of human relationships. Wagner also identifies an artistic egoism in which a performer or individual art seeks prominence at the expense of the shared dramatic work.
Eigentum (Property) Property is possession hardened into a right, which Wagner treats as a source of social ruin. In Opera and Drama, he says that from such ownership, looked on as the base of all good order, “there issue all the crimes of myth and history.” The Wibelungen traces how possession replaced personal worth as the title to all rights, a theme the Ring gives mythic form in the cursed gold. In Hero-dom and Christendom, he recalls the rule that man ennobles property, and property does not ennoble man.
Einheit (Unity) Unity is the felt coherence of a work's dramatic content and expressive form. Wagner's interwoven musical themes allow separate moments, memories, and expectations to become parts of a single experience, even across distances in dramatic time and space.
Endreim (End-rhyme) End-rhyme is the rhyme at the close of a line, which Wagner contrasts with Stabreim. In Opera and Drama, he calls it the verbal residue of Christian melody, and a help-in-need for establishing verse, with no integral connection to the phrase. It became indispensable where verse was governed only by the number of syllables, and once set to music it was drowned in the melody.
Entsagung (Renunciation) Renunciation is the relinquishment of a desire, possession, claim, or attachment that has governed one's actions. Its ethical value depends on what is relinquished and why: surrendering power for another differs sharply from Alberich's renunciation of love in pursuit of power. In Wagner's later thought, renunciation acquires particular importance as a movement away from egoistic striving toward compassion and release.
Ergriffenheit (Seized by feeling) A state of overwhelming emotional and spiritual absorption in which a work of art seizes the whole being, transcending ordinary intellectual understanding. Wagner sought to engineer such experiences in his audience, producing moments of artistic revelation in which music communicates profound truths about love, suffering, and existence directly through feeling rather than rational explanation.
Erinnerung (Remembrance) Remembrance is the orchestra's power to recall an earlier feeling at the moment it bears on the drama. In Opera and Drama, it is paired with foreboding: the melodic moments are those “in which we remember a Foreboding, whilst they turn our Remembrance into a prophecy.” In A Communication to My Friends, Wagner distinguishes this developed use of themes from the mere reminiscence of his earlier work.
Erkenntnis (Knowledge and insight) Wagner gives particular importance to knowledge gained through self-understanding, intuition, and recognition of another's suffering. In his later writings, Schopenhauer's philosophy helps him connect this insight with compassion and with an understanding of the underlying unity of living beings.
Erlösung (Redemption) Redemption means release from a condition of bondage, division, or unfulfilled striving. Wagner applies it to the artist's realization in a work, the reunion of separated arts, and, in his later thought, liberation from egoistic desire through love, compassion, and renunciation.
Erlösung dem Erlöser (Redemption of the Redeemer) This is the final choral invocation of Parsifal, more literally rendered as redemption to the redeemer. One reading understands it as the fulfillment of redemption through compassion, bringing release to the suffering borne by the redeeming figure. Its precise reference remains open to interpretation, connecting the drama's Christian symbolism with the healing of Amfortas and renewal of the Grail community.
Festspiele (Festival performances) Festival performances bring artists and audiences together for concentrated attention to an exceptional dramatic undertaking. Wagner proposes specially organized conditions in which preparation, staging, musical performance, and reception can all serve the same artistic purpose.
Frauen als Erlöserinnen (Women as redeemers) Wagner repeatedly gives women a decisive role in releasing others from isolation, guilt, or destructive striving through fidelity, love, and sacrifice. Figures such as Senta, Elisabeth, and Brünnhilde embody different versions of this dramatic pattern. It gives women profound transformative power while also reflecting historically gendered expectations that their devotion should redeem others.
Freiheit (Freedom) In Wagner's early writings, freedom grows from the fulfillment of genuine human needs, culminating in love. It becomes possible when people can realize their capacities through mutual relationships and artistic activity, beyond coercion and merely private advantage.
Gebärde (Gesture) Gesture makes inward emotion visible through bodily movement and expression. When coordinated with words and music, it helps the audience understand feelings and relationships that cannot be fully conveyed through speech alone.
Gedanke (Thought) Thought in Wagner's theory arises from feeling and returns to it. In Opera and Drama, he says that thought is roused by emotion and must flow back into emotion, for “a thought is the bond between an absent and a present emotion.” Verse-melody materializes thought by turning an emotion recalled by memory into a present one. Music cannot think, but it can realize a thought in this way.
Gefühl (Feeling) Feeling is the faculty through which artistic meaning becomes immediately experienced and understood. In drama, music allows the audience to apprehend relationships and motives that an intellectual explanation alone would leave external or abstract.
Gefühlswerdung des Verstandes (Emotionalizing of the understanding) The emotionalizing of the understanding is the complete passing of the poet's intention into the artwork, so that what was thought is now felt. In Opera and Drama, Wagner calls this the poet's true ability: wherever the intention remains observable, the impression is chilling, and it succeeds only when, carried from the understanding to the feeling through the senses, it has become imperceptible. Nothing is then left for the intellect to work out, for in drama we must become knowers through feeling.
Gemeinsamkeit (Commonality) Great dramatic art arises from a shared human impulse expressed through the cooperation of different arts and artists. Wagner takes Greek tragedy as an example of a community recognizing itself in its artistic creation.
Gemüt (Inner life) Gemüt names the inward life of feeling, disposition, and spiritual receptivity. Wagner locates religious consolation and deep artistic understanding within this inwardness, where the demands and distractions of external life can lose their power.
Genie (Genius) Genius is an exceptional creative individuality capable of revealing something universally human. Wagner emphasizes its powerful need to communicate and its often painful conflict with a society unable to understand or accommodate it.
Genossenschaft (Fellowship) Fellowship is the free association of artists who create and perform a work together. In The Artwork of the Future, Wagner's chain of questions ends with it: the artist of the future is the poet, the poet is the performer, and the performer is “the Fellowship of all the Artists.” He finds a model in the players' fellowships that arose from the people at the end of the Middle Ages, and he argues that individuality asserts itself most fully within such a fellowship.
Gesamtkunstwerk (Total artwork) The total artwork unites poetry, music, bodily expression, and the visual arts in one coherent dramatic creation. Each art realizes its fullest powers through cooperation with the others, allowing the whole work to communicate more completely than an isolated medium could.
Gesang (Singing) Singing intensifies the expressive sound of speech and provides Wagner with a fundamental model for musical phrasing. Dramatic singing must make the words, their accents, and the feeling they embody intelligible as a single expressive act.
Geschichte (History) History is the record of human action as conditioned by its circumstances, and Wagner sets it against myth as material for drama. In Opera and Drama, he argues that historical subjects cannot be understood from a purely human standpoint, since their actions must be explained by their surroundings, which burdens the understanding. Myth condenses what history disperses, and he sees the two as related, since history grew out of myth and myth is justified by it. In Art and Climate, he describes modern life as shaped by a history at variance with nature.
Gral und Nibelungenhort (Grail and Nibelung hoard) The Grail and the Nibelung hoard are linked in The Wibelungen, Wagner's account of myth and medieval history. The hoard is the sum of earthly power, which he connects with the claims of the Frankish kings and the German emperors. As it lost material worth and the imperial office took a more ideal direction, its ideal content rose, he says, into the legend of the Holy Grail, which arrives in the world at that very moment. The essay thus gives a historical bridge between the worlds of the Ring and Parsifal.
Griechische Tragödie (Greek tragedy) Wagner idealizes Greek tragedy as an art in which poetry, music, dance, religious meaning, and communal life belong together. It provides a model for overcoming the separation of the modern arts and reconnecting performance with a people's shared concerns. His account serves his programme of artistic renewal and is an idealized interpretation of antiquity.
Handlung (Action) Action is the kernel of drama, and the link between the artwork and life. In The Artwork of the Future, it is the first requirement of drama, the moment that ensures its widest understanding because it is drawn directly from life. It must also be a completed action, since only then can its necessity be seen. In On the name “Musikdrama,” Wagner says that he would gladly have called his dramas “deeds of Music brought to sight.”
Harmonie (Harmony) Harmony gives music an underlying field of relationships through which feeling can develop, intensify, and change direction. Wagner treats harmonic movement as essential to the expressive growth of melody and its response to dramatic needs.
Heiliger (Saint) The saint embodies an enduring liberation from egoistic willing through renunciation and compassion. Wagner compares the inspired musician's temporary illumination with this condition, while regarding the saint's transformation as more lasting and complete.
Heldentum (Heroism) Heroism is the deed by which a higher nature shows that suffering has raised it to knowledge of the world's meaning. In Hero-dom and Christendom, Wagner takes Herakles as the plainest type, a hero nearly always found in suffering prepared by fate. The saint is the hero transformed, who turns against the ruin of his own race's code of honor, and outdoes the hero in enduring suffering and giving himself for others. The essay's account of heroism is bound up with its racial claims.
Hellsehen (Clairvoyance) Clairvoyance is the musician's inner vision of the world's innermost dream, beyond the bounds of time and space. In Beethoven, following Schopenhauer's account of dreams, Wagner compares the composer to a somnambulist who reports what she has seen within. He ranks this state below only the saint's, because the musician must keep returning to individual consciousness. The listener enters a related state, in which what the eyes see ceases to disturb.
Improvisation (Improvisation) Improvisation is the natural starting point of dramatic art, in which the performer creates directly. In The Destiny of Opera, Wagner argues that the poet gains artistic value by making the improvising spirit of the mime his own, and he defines Shakespeare's drama as a “fixed mimetic improvisation.” He treats Beethoven's works in the same way, recalling reports that nothing could compare with Beethoven's improvising at the piano.
Individuationsprinzip (Principle of individuation) In Schopenhauer's philosophy, the principle of individuation (principium individuationis) concerns the forms, especially space and time, through which reality appears as a multiplicity of separate beings. Wagner draws on this framework when presenting love and compassion as experiences that can overcome the apparent absoluteness of the boundary between self and other. It helps connect his dramatic treatment of personal relationships with questions about the underlying unity of existence.
Industrie (Industry) Industry is the modern power that makes both labor and art into commerce. In Art and Revolution, Wagner says that the true essence of modern art is industry, its ethical aim the gaining of gold, and that “God has become our Industry” for the sake of the rich. Factories show the deepest degradation of man, constant labor without joy or love. He looks ahead to a time when industry is “no longer our mistress but our handmaid.”
Karfreitagszauber (Good Friday magic) In Parsifal's third act, the renewed beauty of the meadow becomes an image of reconciliation between humanity and the natural world. Gurnemanz explains this transformation through compassion, repentance, and the creatures' release from the harm human beings inflict. The scene joins spiritual renewal to a changed way of perceiving and treating living things.
Kommunismus (Communism) Communism in Wagner's Zurich writings means the common life of humanity as the opposite of egoism, and is not a party program. In The Artwork of the Future, he says that “only in Communism does Egoism find its perfect satisfaction,” and that the history of absolute egoism will end in redemption into communism. He notes in the preface to Art and Revolution that he openly used the word in contrast to egoism. By Beethoven, he treats social communism only as a possible force that might overturn civilization.
Kritik (Criticism) Criticism is judgment of art from outside the need to create it. In Opera and Drama, Wagner says that the critic “does not feel within himself the imperious Necessity that drives the Artist,” and so can always stop at indecision. He attacks the “impartial criticism” of his opponents in A Communication to My Friends. Yet he also says that everyone must now take up criticism, since only through it can the errors of an art come to consciousness.
Kunst (Art) Art makes the deeper significance of life perceptible through images, sounds, and enacted experience. For Wagner, its highest achievement is to raise human beings beyond their ordinary limitations while communicating something essential about their existence.
Kunst des Übergangs (Art of transition) The art of transition is the gradual mediation between extremes of mood, so that even a sudden change seems prepared and necessary. In an 1859 letter to Mathilde Wesendonck, Wagner calls it his subtlest and profoundest art, since the whole fabric of his music is made of such transitions. He names the great scene in the second act of Tristan und Isolde as his masterpiece in it, leading from the most violent emotions of life to a solemn longing for death.
Kunst und Revolution (Art and revolution) In Wagner's revolutionary writings, the renewal of art depends on a transformation of the society that produces and receives it. Art can become a shared expression of human freedom when it is released from the demands of commercial profit, social privilege, and merely private entertainment.
König (King) The king is the ideal of the state in On State and Religion. Wagner argues that he guarantees the state's stability, while his own highest interest soars above it, since he has nothing personally in common with party interests. He alone can represent the purely human interest against the parties, and he suffers for it as no one else can. The essay was written in the context of Wagner's relationship with Ludwig II. The Wibelungen gives an earlier and more historical account of kingship.
Können (Ability) Ability is the point at which an artist's will is fully realized in the work. In Opera and Drama, Wagner says that where we still see the poet willing, we feel that he cannot yet do it; the poet's ability is the complete passing of the intention into the artwork. This contrast between willing and being able also appears in The Artwork of the Future, where the poet's will passes into the performer's art.
Künstlerische Illusion (Artistic illusion) The spectator can know that a staged world is invented while becoming absorbed in the feelings and relationships it reveals. For Wagner, such consciously experienced appearance can release attention from practical self-interest and disclose truths that habitual social life obscures.
Leiden (Suffering) Suffering makes the limits and conflicts of existence directly felt. In Wagner's later thought, awareness of suffering can become a source of insight and compassion, turning attention away from private satisfaction toward the condition of other beings.
Leitmotiv (Leading motif) A leitmotif is a musical idea tied to a person, object, or thought in the drama. The word is not Wagner's own: in On the Application of Music to the Drama, he refers to what a younger friend calls his “Leitmotive,” and says the friend studied their dramatic significance more than their musical construction. In Opera and Drama, he had said the orchestra would make such melodic moments into “guides-to-Feeling” (Gefühlswegweiser) through the labyrinthine building of the drama.
Liebe (Love) Love is a free giving of oneself in which individual powers find their fullest expression through devotion to another. Across Wagner's writings it becomes a force of understanding and liberation, while his later account of redeeming Christian love emphasizes its origin in compassion.
Liebesnacht (Night of love) The night of love in Tristan und Isolde is the lovers' imagined realm of intimacy beyond the demands and divisions of Day. In their Act Two duet, their wish for union develops toward the overcoming of separate names, identities, and ordinary boundaries of consciousness. Night therefore carries both an erotic meaning and a metaphysical aspiration toward undivided existence.
Liebestod (Love-death) Love-death names the convergence of love, death, and a hoped-for release from separate existence in Tristan und Isolde. In common usage, it refers especially to Isolde's final scene, where musical resolution accompanies her vision of Tristan transfigured. Its dramatic significance lies in the lovers' longing for a union that the world of ordinary life appears unable to sustain.
Lieblosigkeit (Lovelessness) Lovelessness is the failure of love that Wagner sees at the root of social and personal ruin. In Opera and Drama, it is the essence of the barrier of prejudice that takes the place naturally belonging to love. In his 1854 letter to August Röckel, he traces it to fear: “The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness.” His late essay “What Boots This Knowledge?” asks that the world's great lovelessness be regarded as its suffering, and met with compassion.
Luxus (Luxury) Luxury names the artificial wants fostered by inequality, status, and the pursuit of pleasure beyond genuine human need. In Wagner's early social criticism, it turns art into an ornament or commodity for privileged consumers. His alternative is an art rooted in shared needs and the free development of human capacities.
Lyrik (Lyric) The lyric is the original art in which poetry, music, and dance were united. Wagner sees the words and verse of the oldest lyric as proceeding from melody, and he calls drama its perfected form in The Artwork of the Future. In Opera and Drama, lyric holds the germ of all poetry, while the drama vindicates it. Lyric outpouring in his own drama must therefore be a necessary outcome of its motives and not an ornament added from outside.
Melodie (Melody) Wagner understands melody broadly as the meaningful, feeling-bearing form of music. His conception includes an extended musical development in which many changing phrases belong to one continuous expressive whole.
Melodische Momente (Melodic motifs) These recurring musical ideas, closely associated with what are commonly called leitmotifs, arise from the drama's central motives and emotional situations. Through meaningful return and combination they awaken memory and anticipation, communicate unspoken relationships, and bind the work together.
Melos (Melos) Melos is the melodic character of a piece of music, which a performance must find and make sing. In On Conducting, Wagner says that the right comprehension of the melos is the sole guide to the right tempo, and that the two are inseparable. He credits Habeneck's Paris orchestra with this achievement in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: it had learned to look for the melody in every bar.
Mime (Performer) The mime is the performer who embodies the drama on stage. In The Artwork of the Future, Wagner asks who will be the poet, and answers that it is the performer. In Opera and Drama, the performer is the most necessary condition for drama's possibility. The Destiny of Opera finds the essence of dramatic art here and not in literary poetry, arguing that the dramatist must issue from the heart of the mime.
Mitleid (Compassion) Compassion means directly sharing in another being's suffering and being moved to relieve it. In Wagner's later thought it becomes the foundation of morality and a path beyond egoism, extending to animals as well as human beings.
Mitschöpfer des Kunstwerkes (Co-creator of the artwork) The receptive spectator becomes a participant in the artwork through feeling, expectation, and imaginative involvement. Music prepares this participation by awakening emotional needs that the unfolding drama then satisfies or transforms.
Mitwisser (Fellow-knower) A fellow-knower is a member of the audience who shares in the drama's inner workings. In Opera and Drama, Wagner says that through the orchestra's melodic moments we become “the constant fellow-knowers of the profoundest secret of the poetic intention,” and immediate partners in realizing it. Elsewhere in his writings, the wish for such sharers extends beyond the theater, to those who will take up his purpose and win others to it.
Mode (Fashion) Fashion is the artificial stimulus that rouses an unnatural need where no natural one exists. In The Artwork of the Future, Wagner sets it against necessity: what grows from real need is genuinely required, while fashion commands arbitrarily and changes restlessly without cause. Unable to invent, it can only borrow from nature and disfigure what it takes, so it stands opposed to the need from which true art arises.
Modulation (Modulation) Modulation is the movement from one key to another, which Wagner treats as a means of poetic meaning. In Opera and Drama, a verse of like emotion stays in one key, but “die Liebe bringt Lust und Leid” passes from one key to another, so that opposite feelings are heard as akin. This goes further than Stabreim, and he says only music can do it. In On the Application of Music to the Drama, daring modulation is the line of cleavage between symphonist and dramatist, since the drama can justify what would be a mere effect in the symphony.
Motivische Verwandlung (Thematic transformation) A recurring musical idea can change its harmony, rhythm, orchestration, or melodic shape as the drama develops. Such transformations allow an earlier association to acquire a new emotional significance or reveal a relationship that was previously hidden. The motif's identity therefore persists through change, making musical memory an active part of dramatic understanding.
Musik (Music) Music communicates inward feeling with a directness that ordinary conceptual language cannot achieve. In Wagner's later, Schopenhauer-influenced thought, it expresses the world's inner essence and acquires an exceptional power to reveal, console, and redeem.
Musik und Zeiterfahrung (Music and experienced time) Wagner's musical dramas shape the experience of time through prolonged expectation, recollection, thematic return, and sustained attention to inward feeling. A brief action can open into an extended psychological experience, while music can connect events separated by long stretches of dramatic time. This flexibility is especially significant in the love duet of Tristan und Isolde and the ceremonial passages of Parsifal.
Musikdrama (Music drama) Music drama is the familiar designation for Wagner's integration of dramatic action and musical expression. Wagner himself objected to the label, partly because it could imply a drama made for the purposes of music and partly because he resisted reducing his works to a readily imitated genre.
Musikjudentum (Music-Jewdom) Musikjudentum is Wagner’s antisemitic term for a musical tendency he associated with the substitution of erudition for passionate expression. Its conceptual basis lies in Das Judentum in der Musik (1850), where he alleged that Jewish composers could acquire extensive musical sophistication but lacked the "true passion" that impelled authentic artistic creation. In the 1869 republication of the essay he extended the term to include non-Jewish musicians also exhibiting "shapeless, sickly mannerism".
Mystischer Abgrund (Mystic abyss) The mystic abyss is Wagner's name for the separation between the audience's everyday surroundings and the imagined world of the stage at Bayreuth. The concealed orchestra and the architectural framing of the stage help create this separation, allowing music to act without the distraction of visible instrumental performers. The arrangement supports an experience in which the drama seems to emerge from a world apart.
Mythos (Myth) Myth gives concentrated, humanly intelligible form to a people's understanding of nature, existence, and its own experience. Wagner values it as dramatic material because its essential relationships can speak directly to feeling without requiring extensive historical explanation.
Natur (Nature) Nature is the source and standard from which Wagner measures human life and art: “As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man.” In his Zurich writings, it stands opposed to fashion, luxury, and a civilization at variance with human needs, and art is healthy when it arises from natural necessity. In Art and Climate, he calls humanity nature's highest product, and so the proper subject of art.
Notwendigkeit (Necessity) Necessity describes what grows from the actual conditions and needs of life, character, or artistic development. A convincing drama makes its actions and forms feel internally required, so that the audience experiences their connection rather than the author's arbitrary decisions.
Oper (Opera) Wagner criticizes conventional opera when musical display, theatrical spectacle, and the ambitions of separate contributors displace the dramatic purpose. His reform seeks an integrated work in which the expressive means become necessary to the action and its emotional meaning.
Orchester (Orchestra) The orchestra extends the expressive world around the characters and reveals emotional relationships beyond their spoken or sung words. It sustains the drama through transitions, intimations, and recollections, while giving continuity to feelings that the stage can show only in particular moments.
Orchester als griechischer Chor (Orchestra as Greek chorus) Wagner compares the orchestra's dramatic function with that of the chorus in Greek tragedy, which gives events a wider emotional and communal significance. Through musical recollection, anticipation, and expressive continuity, the orchestra can make relationships perceptible beyond what the characters explicitly say or understand. It performs this interpretive role through sound rather than as an additional speaking character.
Organismus (Organism) An artwork understood as an organism develops from relationships and needs within its own material. Wagner wants each moment to grow intelligibly from what precedes it and help produce the larger whole, as parts of a living organism sustain one another.
Pessimismus (Pessimism) Pessimism recognizes the suffering, violence, and frustrated striving that pervade historical human life. The lexicon also records Wagner's reservations about an absolute pessimism, since he wants to preserve the possibility of moral and cultural regeneration.
Phantasie (Imagination) Imagination transforms experienced appearances into new images that express their human significance. It also mediates between intellect and feeling, making an abstract relationship available as a sensuous or dramatic experience.
Programmmusik (Program music) Program music is instrumental music guided by a poetic idea or story. In On the Application of Music to the Drama, Wagner traces how the “Programmist,” with a poetic shape always in mind, gave his themes a passionate and eccentric character that pure symphonic music had held aloof from. He says this led at last to melodrama music with pantomime to be supposed. For him, the tendency shows instrumental music pressing toward the drama.
Rasse, Entartung und Regeneration (Race, degeneration, and regeneration) Wagner's late writings sometimes combine moral and cultural criticism with false racial hierarchies and speculative claims about heredity, diet, and human decline. These ideas belong to nineteenth-century racial ideology and provide no valid basis for judging human worth or artistic ability. His appeals to universal compassion consequently coexist with prejudices that restrict or contradict their implications.
Regeneration (Regeneration) Regeneration is humanity's recovery from what Wagner diagnoses as moral and cultural degeneration. His late proposals link religious renewal with compassion, animal protection, vegetarianism, temperance, and changes in social life.
Religion (Religion) Wagner understands religion at its deepest as an inward transformation of humanity's relationship to suffering and the world. Its truth becomes evident through compassion, renunciation, gentleness, and lived example, rather than resting solely on institutions or doctrinal argument.
Religion und Kunst (Art and religion) Wagner argues that art can preserve the inner truth of religion when religious institutions become preoccupied with insisting on the literal truth of their symbols. Artistic representation allows the spiritual meaning of those symbols to become perceptible through feeling.
Revolution (Revolution) Revolution for Wagner is a transformation of humanity and not only of politics. In Art and Revolution, he says that the artwork of the future can be won only through “the great Revolution of Mankind,” which alone can bring it forth anew. In A Communication to My Friends, he declares himself against a purely formal and political conception of revolution, and for keeping its purely human kernel in view. He also hoped that art could direct revolution into the peaceful stream of humanity.
Rhythmus (Rhythm) Rhythm is the ordering of movement in time, and the point where music first joins with the body. In The Artwork of the Future, it springs from the necessity behind bodily motion, and tone gives dance its measure back with soul and sense. In Opera and Drama, musical rhythm explained to the ear what the dance revealed to the eye, as the falling foot corresponds to the accented beat. This kinship underlies the orchestra's ability to speak alongside gesture.
Roman (Novel) The novel is the form in which modern life found its artistic expression, and Wagner sets it against the drama. In Opera and Drama, he calls it the real kernel of modern poetry and one of the two origins of modern drama. He writes that “the Drama lays bare to us the Organism of mankind,” whereas the novel shows the mechanism of history, explaining individuals by their surroundings. Its procedure is therefore mechanical, and the drama's is organic.
Schallwelt und Lichtwelt (Sound-world and light-world) The sound-world is the second world of consciousness that exists beside the visible light-world, known only through the ear. In Beethoven, Wagner says it bears the same relation to the visible world as dreaming to waking. Its root is the scream, in which the will makes its first entrance into sound, and every gentler cry of longing descends from this. Music is thus the expression of the world's inner nature, as the eye gives only the appearance of things.
Schleier der Maya (Veil of Maya) In the Schopenhauerian interpretation Wagner adopts, the veil of Maya is the appearance of a world divided into independently existing, separate beings. It conceals the underlying unity that becomes perceptible through compassion and the weakening of egoistic self-assertion. The image gives Wagner a language for the difference between everyday appearances and a deeper understanding of existence.
Schönheit und Erhabenheit (Beauty and sublimity) Beauty concerns the perceptible form through which an artwork engages us, while sublimity involves an overwhelming encounter with a depth beyond ordinary satisfaction or self-interest. In Wagner's later musical aesthetics, beautiful form can become the means through which music reveals its sublime significance and carries the listener beyond the limits of everyday individuality.
Sehen und Hören (Seeing and hearing) Wagner's later aesthetics contrasts the visible world of distinct objects with music's access to inward feeling and the movement of the will. Hearing becomes his model for apprehending an underlying unity that vision, organized by separation in space, tends to conceal. Their interaction helps explain how the visible drama and the musical experience can illuminate different aspects of the same event.
Sehnsucht (Longing) Longing is a yearning for a fulfillment that ordinary experience cannot securely provide. In Tristan und Isolde, it animates both the lovers' desire and the music's repeated movement toward a resolution that remains deferred. It can express erotic attachment, the pain of separation, and a desire for release from the limits of individual existence.
Selbstentäußerung (Self-surrender) In the lexicon's discussion of acting and creation, self-surrender is the ability to move beyond one's ordinary personality and inhabit another being or artistic image. The highest artistic achievement combines this identification with the clear awareness needed to shape and communicate it.
Sprache (Language) Wagner traces language to expressive sounds rooted in feeling, which gradually become conventional signs and abstract concepts. Poetry and music can renew its expressive force by reconnecting the meaning of words with their audible and emotional life.
Sprachwurzeln (Speech-roots) Speech-roots are the root syllables in which a language originally expressed both an object and the sensation it aroused. In Opera and Drama, Wagner says that stresses in living verse should fall on these syllables, and that Stabreim joins them so that their kinship is felt by the ear. He claims that German alone among operatic languages still hangs conspicuously together with its roots, and so he considers it the only one fitted to renew artistic expression.
Staat (State) Wagner frequently portrays the state as an organization of power, property, and practical interests that regulates human conduct from outside. His social and religious ideals seek forms of community in which mutual understanding and compassion can overcome the need for coercion.
Stabreim (Alliteration) Alliteration links strongly stressed words through their initial sounds. Wagner values it for making relationships between words immediately audible and for providing a flexible foundation for dramatic melody, especially in the Ring.
Stimmung (Mood) Mood is the emotional state that colors how a work is conceived and received, and how a person perceives the world. In Opera and Drama, moved by a heightened mood, people find it reflected in nature and refer nature back to themselves. In A Communication to My Friends, Wagner takes the disappearance of The Flying Dutchman from the Berlin repertory as a lesson: such a work, born of a particular mood, is unfit for routine theatrical use. The art of transition is then the art of guiding the audience between extremes of mood.
Symphonie (Symphony) Wagner regards the symphony, especially in Beethoven, as the highest development of instrumental music's inherited forms and expressive capacities. He interprets Beethoven's Ninth as a decisive opening toward the human voice and drama, while drawing on symphonic thematic unity for his own dramatic works.
Sünde (Sin) Sin in Wagner's late thought is the deterioration that the human race comes to recognize in itself through pain and suffering. In Religion and Art, he says that Brahmanism and Christianity brought the knowledge of sin into the world, and then used it to found a dominion over souls that fouled their purity. He begins with the Brahmanic doctrine that killing living creatures is sinful, which he calls the root of all true religious conviction. Christ, recognized as sinless, offers his own flesh and blood as expiation.
Tag und Nacht (Day and night) In Tristan und Isolde, Day represents the public world of names, rank, duties, and appearances that keeps the lovers apart. Night becomes their image of an inward union beyond those divisions and, ultimately, beyond separate individuality. The opposition gives the drama a symbolic language for the conflict between worldly existence and the lovers' longing for transcendence.
Tanz (Dance) Dance is one of the three primal sister arts, with tone and poetry, in The Artwork of the Future. It sets forth the expressive movements of the body, and the law of rhythm is begotten from it. Wagner holds that the arts lost their necessity once they separated, and he calls for all three to unite again in drama. In Opera and Drama, the orchestra owes its power of expressing gesture to its accompaniment of the dance.
Tierschutz (Animal protection) Wagner treats concern for animals as a practical expression of compassion for all living beings. His opposition to cruelty and vivisection follows from his conviction that animals share the same fundamental capacity for desire and suffering as human beings.
Tod (Death) Death completes a life and so makes its meaning fully knowable. In The Artwork of the Future, Wagner says that a person is freed from arbitrary interpretation only by dying, and that the best dramatic subject is an action ending with the hero's life, which the community celebrates in the drama. In Opera and Drama, Greek death rounds off a fulfilled life, while for the Christian death is the object itself. His 1854 letter to Röckel adds: “We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word.”
Tonsprache (Tone-speech) Tone-speech is music understood as a language of feeling, as distinct from the word-speech that addresses the understanding. In Opera and Drama, Wagner argues that feeling fled from purely intellectual speech into absolute tone-speech, the music of his day. In The Artwork of the Future, Beethoven carries this language to its limits, and the orchestra brings it into drama.
Traum (Dream) Dreaming provides Wagner with an analogy for the emergence of perceptible images from a deeper inner life. He uses this analogy to explain how music gives an inward experience a form that can enter ordinary consciousness.
Traumorgan (Dream organ) In his Beethoven essay, Wagner draws on Schopenhauer's speculative account of an inward faculty through which dreams become perceptible without ordinary external sensory stimulation. He uses this faculty as an analogy for the musician's access to an inner experience that is subsequently communicated in sound. The term belongs to this philosophical explanation of artistic consciousness, rather than identifying an established anatomical organ.
Unendliche Melodie (Endless melody) Endless melody is a continuous, developing musical expression that can extend through an entire dramatic work. Its unity comes from the changing emotional action and interrelated musical ideas, rather than dependence on a succession of self-contained numbers.
Untergang (Downfall) Downfall is the end that Wotan comes to desire in the Ring. In an 1854 letter to August Röckel, Wagner says that Wotan rises to the tragic height of willing his own destruction, and calls this the lesson of human history: to will what necessity imposes and to bring it about ourselves. A letter of 1864 to Ludwig II adds that Wotan lives on in Siegfried as an artist lives on in his work. The word also has a political sense in Wagner's demand for the downfall of the state.
Urmelodie (Primal melody) Primal melody is the original expression of feeling in tone, from which speech itself arose. In Opera and Drama, Wagner says that sensations gradually concentrated into more definite content, until their expression in this melody advanced to word-speech. In the oldest lyric, words and verse proceeded from the tones. Modern speech has lost all memory of this source, and verse-melody moves in the reverse direction, from the understanding back to feeling.
Vegetarismus (Vegetarianism) Wagner associates abstaining from meat with compassion for animals and a wider effort to transform human conduct. In his late writings, this ethical concern is mixed with speculative claims about diet, violence, history, and the degeneration or renewal of humanity. The compassionate motive can be distinguished from those unsupported historical and physiological explanations.
Verdichtung (Condensation) Condensation is the drawing together of many scattered actions into a few strengthened moments that feeling can grasp at once. In Opera and Drama, Wagner calls it the work proper to the poetizing understanding. It means simplifying the action and strengthening its motives, with the motives of discarded moments taken up into those that remain. Myth, which gathers manifold phenomena into a single human form, works in the same way.
Verneinung des Willens (Denial of the will) Under Schopenhauer's influence, Wagner understands liberation as a turning away from the compulsive desires through which the will perpetuates conflict and suffering. Compassion and renunciation can interrupt this self-assertion and redirect conduct toward the relief of suffering.
Vernunft (Reason) Reason is the understanding once it recognizes its dependence on feeling and vindicates it. In Opera and Drama, Wagner calls it the highest social force, able to judge individual feelings fairly and to address the person of feeling through love. His later writings stress its limits: in Beethoven, following Schopenhauer, the composer speaks the highest wisdom in a language his reason does not understand.
Versmelodie (Verse-melody) Verse-melody is the vocal melody that grows out of the sung poetic line. In Opera and Drama, Wagner calls it the uniting bond between word-speech and tone-speech, the offspring of the marriage of poetry and music. It turns one side to the understanding and the other to feeling, and he compares it to a boat carried on the sounding surface of the orchestra.
Verstand (Understanding) The understanding is the faculty that dissects, combines, and reasons in abstract concepts. In Opera and Drama, Wagner faults modern drama for addressing it instead of feeling, whose immediate certainty it depends on: the understanding can say “so is it” only after feeling has said “so must it be.” Once it recognizes this dependence on feeling, it is no longer opposed to feeling and becomes reason (Vernunft).
Virtuose (Virtuoso) The virtuoso is the performer who gives a work physical existence, and whose display can betray it. In The Virtuoso and the Artist, Wagner says that the virtuoso's real dignity rests solely on the dignity he preserves for creative art, for he is the intermediary of the artistic idea. In Opera and Drama, the singers' virtuosity is what remained once the pretense of drama had been swept away.
Volk (People) In Wagner's early social and artistic theory, the people are those united by a shared need and the impulse to overcome it. Their common life is the source of myth, language, and communal art, although his use of the term also acquires national and exclusionary meanings in other contexts.
Volkslied (Folk song) Folk song is an expression of communal feeling that develops through the artistic capacities of a people. Wagner regards it as a living source of melody and criticizes the extraction of attractive tunes from that communal setting for fashionable entertainment.
Vorrang der Musik (Primacy of music) Where Wagner's earlier theory presents music as a means of realizing poetic intention, his later writings give it privileged access to the inner reality that drama makes visible. Words and stage images then help specify or embody a meaning whose deepest expressive source lies in music.
Vorspiel (Dramatic prelude) A dramatic prelude establishes the emotional and musical world of a work before its visible action begins. Through recurring ideas, harmonic tensions, and their development, it can prepare the audience to feel relationships whose full significance emerges only during the drama.
Vorstellung (Representation) In Schopenhauer's philosophy, representation is the world as it appears to a perceiving subject through forms such as space, time, and causality. Wagner draws on this distinction between the world of appearances and its underlying essence when explaining music's exceptional significance. In his later aesthetics, drama gives visible form to relationships whose inward reality music is understood to express more directly.
Wahn (Delusion and illusion) Wahn includes the deceptive appearances and imagined purposes through which individuals and societies understand their desires and actions. Wagner also uses it for an ennobling religious or artistic illusion that loosens the hold of ordinary self-interest. Its meaning therefore varies with context and cannot simply be reduced to madness or falsehood.
Welt (World) In Wagner's later philosophical language, the world is the realm in which a common underlying will appears divided into competing and suffering beings. Compassion discloses a unity beneath this division and makes liberation from its egoistic demands conceivable.
Welt-Tragik (Tragedy of existence) The tragedy of existence lies in the suffering and conflict that persist throughout living nature, even beyond human injustice. Wagner gives art the task of making this condition deeply felt while opening a way toward compassion and a reconciled experience of life.
Wiedergeburt und Seelenwanderung (Rebirth and transmigration) Wagner explores repeated existence as a way of imagining the persistence of suffering, guilt, and the possibility of redemption across different lives. Kundry's recurring existence gives this idea a dramatic form, connecting her restless service and seduction with a desire for release. His treatment draws on his understanding of Indian religious traditions and Schopenhauer, without forming a consistently defined doctrine of reincarnation.
Wille (Will) In Wagner's later thought, the will is the blind, underlying striving that manifests itself in nature and individual desire. Because it repeatedly encounters resistance and conflicts with itself, it generates suffering; music reveals its inner life, while compassion points toward its transformation and release.
Willkür und Unwillkür (Arbitrary and involuntary) Arbitrary choice and the involuntary are the terms by which The Artwork of the Future opposes reflective caprice to what arises from natural necessity. Wagner treats the arbitrary as the mark of egoistic and artificial life, and the involuntary as the source of true need and art. In a later note to Art and Revolution, he revises the terms after Schopenhauer: the misused “Unwillkür” should really be named the Will, while Willkür means the intellectual will guided by reflection.
Wissenschaft (Science) Science is the path from error to knowledge, which ends by overcoming itself. In The Artwork of the Future, Wagner says that it runs “from Religion to Nature” and that its goal is the justification of the unconscious. It is only mediate, however: life is the ultimate reality, and the direct expression of what science comes to know is art. “What Boots This Knowledge?” later faults science for trusting in constant progress and ignoring the world's degeneracy.
Wort und Ton (Word and tone) Words articulate particular meanings, relationships, and intentions, while music gives them an immediate emotional life that exceeds their conceptual content. Wagner seeks a union in which poetic rhythm, vocal expression, harmony, and dramatic action grow together. His practice of writing both the poetry and music of his dramas embodies this ideal of coordinated creation.
Worttondichter (Word-tone poet) The word-tone poet is the artist who works in both word and tone, uniting what poet and musician had each done separately. Wagner says they have hitherto addressed only half of the listener apiece. In Opera and Drama, the word-poet concentrates scattered moments of action to a point accessible to feeling, and the tone-poet expands that point to its full emotional content. In A Communication to My Friends, Wagner says the matter this poet has to utter is the purely human, freed from convention.
Wunder (Miracle) In Wagner's dramatic theory, the miracle concentrates relationships into an extraordinary event or image that feeling can immediately understand. In his religious reflections, the transformation of the self-seeking will is itself a supreme miracle.
Zivilisation und Kultur (Civilization and culture) Wagner frequently uses civilization critically for a social order dominated by convention, material advantage, and external refinement. Culture means a deeper development of human capacities, especially through art, which he believes must grow from peaceful and inwardly meaningful communal life.
Zukunftsmusik (Music of the future) Music of the future was a term of mockery fastened on Wagner by his opponents. By his own account, it was a critic in the Kölnische Zeitung who twisted his idea of an artwork of the future into a music that might sound well only in time. Liszt accepted the nickname in defiance, Wagner later used it as the title of his 1860 essay, and he remarked that though invented in derision, it had its sense as music for the future.
Zuschauerraum (Festival auditorium) Wagner's theatre ideal directs the audience's attention toward a shared dramatic experience rather than social display. Bayreuth's steeply rising seating and darkened auditorium help concentrate spectators on the stage and reduce distractions from one another. The arrangement gives architectural form to his wish for a gathered community of attentive listeners and viewers.