Dear Uhlig,
I also received the 3 Opera Poems yesterday. The preface had almost slipped my memory, and I practically devoured it whole in such a neat and lavish ( - and fabulously correct!) edition. God knows what other people will think, - but I found this preface enormously interesting, - I can say that without reservation! This was really the most important thing I had to tell the world, since it was indispensably necessary as a supplement to “Opera and Drama”. But I really do think that I have now written enough as a journalist: what is there left to say if my friends do not see things clearly now, and why should I care now if they have still got dirt in their eyes. As for what’s been done, I at least am completely satisfied with myself, for I have certainly spared no effort in making myself understood. The rest is solely the concern of those who take an interest in me!
[...]
Apropos of the vocal score, I have again been glancing briefly through the music of Lohengrin: - might it not be of interest to you - since you do, after all, write such things - to expatiate upon the work’s formal thematic web, and explain how it is bound to lead to ever new formal structures along the road which I myself have opened up? This struck me at various points in the score, including the opening scene of the second act. Right at the beginning of the second scene of this same act - Elsa’s appearance on the balcony - in the woodwind prelude — it struck me that a motif is heard here for the first time in the 7th, 8th and 9th bars of Elsa’s nocturnal appearance, which is later developed, and broadly and brilliantly executed, when, in broad daylight and in all her glory, Elsa makes her way to church. I realized from this that the themes that I write always originate in the context of, and according to the character of, some visual phenomenon on stage. But perhaps you can express yourself better on this matter than I can. -
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 132