Liszt and Wagner. Foreword

Nicolas Dufetel (1)

1 IReMus - Institut de Recherche en Musicologie

For more than a century, our knowledge of the Liszt-Wagner relationship has been flawed, because traditional historiography is based on incomplete, modified, and censored sources — most of them were indeed published before Cosima’s death in 1930, and the editorial praxis in the 50 years after the death of the two composers were generally very different from the today editorial criteria. General interpretation and hermeneutics, for instance of the letters, are based on little reliable documents, and until a complete and critical edition of Liszt’s correspondence and other primary sources is available, one must rely on isolated critical studies or directly on manuscripts. This foreword to the new English translation of Liszt's writings by Janita R. Hall-Swadley (The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt) is partly based on new sources in order to shed a new light on the relationship between Liszt and Wagner (Dramaturgical Leaves, II: Richard Wagner, from Lina Ramann's Gesammelte Schriften).

Mots clés: Liszt; Wagner; writings; dramaturgical leaves; opera

Domaines: Musique, musicologie et arts de la scène

Nicolas Dufetel. Liszt and Wagner. Foreword. Janita R. Hall-Swadley. The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt: Dramaturgical Leaves, II (Richard Wagner), Rowman & Littlefield, pp.xv-xxxviii, 2016. ⟨halshs-01422228⟩