Best of friends,
I cannot delay writing to you a moment longer, though I should have preferred to have waited first for a letter from you in order to be able to answer any possible questions you may have had for me.
As far as I am able to judge from the reports which have reached me concerning the character of the performance of my Lohengrin in Weimar, the first thing to strike me most clearly and indubitably was the testimony to your most unprecedented efforts and self-sacrifice on behalf of my work, your touching affection for me, and the confirmation of your genius for rendering the impossible as good as possible. Only subsequently did it really become clear to me what an enormous task you had undertaken and carried through. I really do not know how I can ever repay you!
[...]
This much, above all, is clear: the performance proved wearisome as a result of the length of time it lasted. I confess that I was alarmed to discover that the opera played until very nearly 11 o’clock at night. I had played the whole work through to myself, immediately after completing it, and timed it exactly, calculating it on the assumption that the 1st act would not last much more than an hour, the 2nd act 1½ hours, and the final act once again a little over an hour, so that, taking into account the two intervals, I reckoned the opera would last from 6 o’clock until a quarter to ten at the latest. I would have questioned whether you had correctly followed the suggested tempo markings, if I had not been expressly informed by my musical friends who know the opera that you had consistently followed the markings as they knew them from me, indeed that here and there you had been somewhat quicker rather than slower. I was accordingly forced to assume that the opera had begun to drag whenever you lost direct control as conductor, - namely in the recitatives. Indeed, my friends confirm that the singers did not pick up the recitatives as I had performed them for them at the piano. Permit me to explain myself somewhat more fully on this point, and forgive me for acting wrongly in not having done so before now.
As a result of the fatal circumstance that virtually the only operas given in German theatres are ones translated from a foreign language, our dramatic singers have been reduced to a state of the most unspeakable demoralization. The translations of French and Italian operas are for the most part the work of bunglers and almost never of people who might have been in a position to restore the sense of harmony between the words and music which had been the case with the original text, and as I, for ex., was at pains to achieve in the most important passages of Gluck’s Iphigenia. The result of all this is that, as time passed, singers have grown accustomed to ignoring the connection between words and music; instead, they articulate an indifferent syllable on the accented note of a melody, and, conversely, they sing the most important word on a rhythmically weak beat, as a result of which they have gradually become used to singing the most utter nonsense, to the extent that it is often a matter of total indifference whether they articulate the text clearly or not. It is now highly amusing to find German critics boasting that only the Germans understand dramatic music, whereas experience proves that even an inferior Italian singer in the wretchedest Italian opera declaims the text more healthily and more expressively than the best German singers can do. - It is the recitative that has come off worst in all this: singers have grown accustomed to seeing in a passage of recitative only a certain traditional sequence of scales which they can distort and draw out at pleasure, just as much as they like. Each time a recitative begins in an opera, what that means for the singers is as much as: “Thank God, that’s the end of those infernal tempo markings which force us every now and then to adopt a certain sensible style of delivery: now we can relax and hold on to the first note that takes our fancy until the prompter shouts out the next phrase; and since the conductor has nothing more to say to us at this point, we can now get our own back for his pretensions by dictating to him when he should stop beating time! etc.” Although not all singers are fully conscious of this sovereign attitude of theirs towards the recitative, they generally follow this routine involuntarily and as a result are confirmed in their natural indolence and flaccidity. The composer who now writes for German singers has therefore to pay particular attention to counteracting this indolent levity by means of certain artistic constraints. Nowhere in my score to Lohengrin have I written the word “Recitative” above a vocal passage; the singers ought not to know that it contains any recitatives. On the contrary, I have been at pains to take account of the spoken emphasis of the words and to denote such emphases so unerringly and so precisely that it should be necessary for the singers simply to sing the notes exactly according to their written value at the given tempo in order to gain control of the correct spoken inflection. I would therefore entreat the singers most earnestly to begin by singing these parlando sections in my opera exactly in tempo - as written; they should perform them in a consistently lively fashion, with clear pronunciation, and in that way we shall achieve much; if they then proceed on this basis with discretionary freedom, showing animation rather than reserve, and if they can then forget what it was they found so awkward about the tempo and produce instead the impression of an impassioned and poetical mode of delivery, - then we shall have achieved everything.
Dingelstedt’s affectionate and witty article on the performance of Lohengrin made a great impression on me. He admits that he previously knew nothing of my work and believes that it is to this circumstance that he must attribute the sense of confusion which this first performance of Lohengrin aroused in him. He transfers this sense of confusion to the nature of the work itself, speaks of countless contradictory aims which he imputes to me, but nowhere do I see him divining the one aim which was my guiding principle, namely the simple unadorned aim - of the drama: he speaks of the impression made on him by flutes, fiddles, kettle-drums and trumpets, but not of the dramatic performers, - in whose stead, as he himself puts it, those very instruments had spoken. From this I gather that in your performance the purely musical achievement was by far the more preponderant, that the orchestra was admirable - as I was indeed assured to have been the case by various experts - and that friend Liszt - and all those directly dependent upon him - was the real hero of the performance. But if we think honestly and unegotistically of the essence of music, we must admit that, on the largest scale, it is only a means to an end: but this end, in any reasonable opera, is the drama, and it lies, most unequivocally, in the hands of the performers on stage. That these performers disappeared before Dingelstedt’s gaze to such an extent that what he heard was not them but the instruments of the orchestra saddens me, for I gather from this that in the warmth and expressiveness of their performances they lagged behind the support which was given them by the orchestra. I admit that a singer who is supported by an orchestra in the way that is the case here needs to be of the very highest and finest quality, and I also believe that such performers may not be easy to find, not just in Weimar but in Germany as a whole. But what in fact is the most basic and central issue here? Is it the voice alone? — indeed, no! It is life and warmth — and, in addition, earnestness of purpose and a powerful strength of will.
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 115