Bayreuther Blätter

Bayreuther Blätter (German: Bayreuth pages) was a monthly newsletter founded in 1878 by its editor Hans von Wolzogen, with the encouragement of Richard Wagner, for visitors to the Bayreuth Festival, which celebrates Wagner's operas. The magazine continued to appear until 1938, the year of Wolzogen's death.

The newsletter carried frequent articles by Wagner himself as well as contributions from many of his circle. Some of these were very substantial; for example, Wagner's essays Religion and Art (October 1880) and Heroism and Christianity (September 1881). From 1880 to 1896 the journal carried extracts from the detailed recollections by Heinrich Porges of Wagner's rehearsal and staging techniques.^[1]

The Bayreuther Blätter remains an important source of information about the Bayreuth Festival in Wagner's last years and about the opinions of his devoted followers.

The critic Eduard Hanslick wrote in 1882:

For a later age, which will be able to look back at the Wagner epidemic of our days in a spirit of calm evaluation, if also one of incredulous astonishment, the Bayreuther Blätter may yet prove to be of no little cultural-historical significance [...] The future cultural historian of Germany will be able to give authentic testimony, on the basis of the first five volumes of this journal, of how strongly the delirium tremens of the Wagnerian intoxication raged amongst us, and what sort of abnormalities of thought and feeling it occasioned in the 'cultured' people of its time^[2]

Further reading

• Thomas S. Grey, Hanslick contra Wagner, in Richard Wagner and his World, ed. Thomas Grey, Princeton, 2009 ISBN 978-0-691-14366-8

References

1. Heinrich Porges website
2. Eduard Hanslick, Wagner-Kultus (1882), cited in translation in Grey (2009), 411