Dear Heine,
When I wrote my flying Dutchman, I was of the conviction that I could not write it in any other way. It was in the course of my famous sea-voyage and among the Norwegian cliffs that the subject-matter - long familiar to me from your namesake’s writings - took on a quite special colour and character, sombre, admittedly, but copied from that same nature of which we are all a part, and not the speculative vision of some gloom-infected dreamer. But the wide wild ocean with its far-flung legends is an element which cannot be reduced compliantly and willingly to a modern opera, and although the legend of the flying Dutchman, filled as it is with the pounding of the sea, now took hold of me in such a way as to demand an artistic reworking, it seemed to me that the legend would have to be dreadfully mutilated and hacked to pieces if it was to be turned into a libretto which would meet modern requirements for piquant situations and unexpected surprises etc. And so I preferred not to alter the subject-matter as it already existed, except in so far as the development of a dramatic plot required it, instead I allowed the whole aura of the legend to spread unchecked over the entire piece, since only in that way did I believe I could hold the listener’s attention, inducing in him that strange frame of mind which alone would persuade even the least poetical listener to conceive an affection - nay - even a real fondness for this most sombre of legends. And I ensured that my music was endowed with a similar character: in order to achieve this aim, I refused to look to the right or to the left of me, or to make the least concession to modern taste since I knew that to have done otherwise would be not only inartistic but unwise. From the outset I had to abandon the modern arrangement of dividing the work into arias, duets, finales etc., and instead relate the legend in a single breath, just as a good poem should be. In this way I produced an opera whose popularity - now that it has been performed - I find impossible to explain since, in all its external details, it is so unlike anything we now understand by the term opera; indeed, only now do I realize what demands I have been placing on audiences, asking them suddenly to forget all that they had previously found entertaining and attractive in the theatre. But the fact that this opera has won so many friends for itself not only in Dresden but, especially, in Cassel and Riga, and that even the wider public has taken the work to heart seems to me to be a very important pointer for us, suggesting that we should henceforth write only what we Germans are inspired to write by our innate sense of poetry, and that we should never again make concessions to any foreign fashions but simply choose and treat those subjects that appeal to us; in that way we shall be quite certain of satisfying our fellow countrymen, too. If we proceed in this way we may yet regain an original German opera, and all who lose heart and who turn in their despair to foreign models may learn from my Dutchman’s example - since it is without doubt conceived in a way that no Frenchman or Italian would ever have conceived it. -
A straightforward account of the action of the opera is sufficient to etc. etc.
Yours,
Richard Wagner.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 60