The attempt has been made in the following to give an idea of the
charm and interest of the original text of the Wagner operas, of
Wagner's extraordinary power and fertility as a dramatist. It is
not critique or commentary, it is presentation, picture, narrative;
it offers nothing that is not derived directly and exclusively
from the Wagner libretti and scores.
The stories of the operas are widely known already, of course.
As literature, however, one may almost say they are not known at
all, unless by students of German. The translators had before them
a task so tremendous, in the necessity to fit their verse-rendering
of the master's poetry to extremely difficult music, that we respect
them for achieving it at all. None the less must the translations
included in our libretti be pronounced painfully inadequate. To
give a better, more complete knowledge of the original poems is
the object of these essays. The poems form, even apart from the
music, a whole beautiful, luminous, romantic world. One would not
lose more by dropping out of literature the Idylls of the King
than the Wagnerian romances.