Interactive Librettos
Wagner's art as sacred drama in a disenchanted age
Excerpts from Wagner's mature dramas in new English translations, each synchronized to a recording. Each libretto is interactive: click any line to jump playback there, and the sung text highlights and scrolls in time with the voice. Where a scene has more than one recording, the picker in the playback bar switches between them. For the fullest experience, enter fullscreen mode (icon at the right of the playback bar), dim the lights as in the theatre, and let the drama unfold in darkness, where imagination becomes the stage.
For Wagner, poem and music were never servant and ornament but a single expressive organism. Hear Tristan as an orchestral tone-poem and you have the skeleton without the living substance; read the libretto without the music and you have a text whose sense was designed to be carried by tones it now lacks. Booklet, recording and commentary usually sit in three separate places. Here they share one surface, so that the relation between word and tone becomes audible as you read.
The translations follow from Wagner's own account of how that organism works. In Opera and Drama he argues that the drama must speak not to the understanding (Verstand) but to the feeling (Gefühl): its sense is meant to be grasped through sound before it is grasped as concept. Stabreim does this by binding root syllables through their sensuous kinship, so that the ear senses the relation of Lust and Leid before the mind names it; the vocal melody grows out of that verse, and the orchestra carries what no word can say. In Beethoven, after Schopenhauer, he goes further: music is the world's inner nature uttered prior to concepts, and the word is its intelligible surface. A translation that renders only the concept therefore discards the half of the meaning that arrives first.
So the English is made to be sung against the score, not read off the page. Stressed syllables fall where the music stresses them, and the key word lands on the note that carries its feeling. Stabreim and rhyme are kept wherever possible, because they are part of the meaning, not decoration. Vowels are chosen to suit the held notes they sit on. Within those constraints the discipline is foreignizing: philosophical precision first, and an archaic register answering to the German rather than an idiomatic modern paraphrase. Every line is a compromise; the aim is that the English and the music arrive together.
The word mystical is meant in Wagner's sense. At the climaxes of Tristan, Parsifal and Götterdämmerung, what you perceive is neither the words nor the notes but their interference pattern, and from it comes what Wagner called Erschütterung: being shaken loose from the ordinary self, which he held, after Schopenhauer, to be the true work of tragic art. It cannot be reached through tone alone or poem alone. These librettos cannot promise it; they try only to stop the standard formats from getting in its way.
