Richard Wagner’s essay “On Franz Liszt’s Symphonic Poems”, which appears here for the first time in Italian translation, with an introduction and commentary, was originally a letter written on February 15, 1857, from Zürich to [Antonia Pauline] Marie zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, the daughter of Liszt’s companion, Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.
The impulse for this essay was the visit Franz Liszt paid to Wagner in the Swiss city in October-November of the previous year. In those weeks he would play for his friend some of his newly-composed symphonic poems. The great impression that these works made on Wagner, who until that time had maintained a cool and reserved attitude toward programme music, drove him to reconsider his own aesthetic hypotheses, and to write the letter to Princess Marie, which was then published with some adaptations in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik for April l0th of that year, and later reprinted in Wagner’s Gesammelte Schriften.
The present translation contains the text published in the Zeitschrift, as well as the suppressed passages of the first version. In contrast to Eduard Hanslick, the great advocate of “absolute music”, Wagner refutes the very idea that something like that could exist: «Nothing is less absolute – he writes – (as to its appearance in Life, of course) than Music, and the champions of an Absolute Music evidently don’t know what they’re talking about». According to Wagner, all music borrows its form from either bodily motion (in dance) or spoken verse. The traditional symphony, he says, owes its articulation to the limited dialectics of change, which follows the structure: lively motion – softer, quieter period – repetition of the livelier motion. But Wagner now sees in Liszt’s symphonic poems a creative alteration of the old forms, which enables the symphonic movement to represent dramatic development, attaining thereby a greater force of expression. The influence of Liszt the composer can be traced not only in Wagner’s mature aesthetic writings, but in his music also. On December 1856, he began working again on the hitherto unfinished Siegfried; and the first draft of the score shows, characteristically, a completely new development of the orchestral part, where one finds a true “system of musical metaphors”, absent in the preceding dramas of the Ring, which can be connected, in a more or less direct manner, to the thematic organisation of Lisztian orchestral works.