Project Description

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Photograph 1867 (National Archive of the Richard Wagner Foundation, Bayreuth)

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was not only productive as a composer throughout his life, but was also active as a poet, writing texts for his own music-theatrical works, and as a commentator on his musical work and the events of the time in art, history, philosophy, religion, politics, and society. The œuvre of - in Wagner's terminology - "poems" and "writings" that was created within half a century is an integral part of the artist's oeuvre and as such is singular both in quantity and in the breadth of its content. At the same time, it is an outstanding testimony to the intellectual and cultural history of the 19th century.

Wagner realised his long-held plan to present his literary works in a bundled form at the beginning of the 1870s: under the title "Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen" (Collected Writings and Poetry), he published a selection of texts that had been scattered over the decades and varied greatly in function, content and ambition, which he now edited or revised for the collected edition. This edition, organised by Wagner, formed the starting point for the reception of his literary thought and was the basis for numerous publications issued after his death.

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Richard Wagner: ›Opera and Drama‹, autograph (National Archive of the Richard Wagner Foundation, Bayreuth)

The object of the editing project is the corpus of Wagner's writings containing 230 titles and a total of about 4000 pages. The aim is the scholarly indexing of the texts as well as their complete edition and commentary. A reliable basis for the undertaking is the recently compiled Wagner-Schriften-Verzeichnis (WSV), which for the first time records and describes all surviving sources on the creation and publication of the writings. The historical-critical edition follows the current standards of edition science - not least computer philology. As a so-called hybrid edition, it uses not only the print medium but also all sensible possibilities of digital text recording, processing, and presentation.

The project is divided into eight modules. Each module will comprise one or two printed "reading volumes"; complementary to these, a text-critical apparatus, commentary and supplementary text and image materials will be offered digitally.