I have always strongly objected to seeing the whole vast apparatus of dramatic action, situation, history, supported by every known art, painting, sculpture, gymnastics, and the rest, used simply to impress upon the public memory so many catchy melodies. I am convinced that the only end commensurate with all this expenditure ought to be nothing less than the dramatic work of art itself, and that the opera is therein superior to the play in that to all the other means of expression it adds that most rich, most various, most inexhaustible one of music.
Now the Greeks, and perhaps even in part the makers of our mediaeval drama, could successfully help out the play, through the addition of music, without materially altering the former. In our own age, however, the heroes of absolute music, that is to say, music divorced from the poet's art, culminating in Beethoven, have, chiefly through the orchestra, developed the expressive capacity of this art till it has acquired a new artistic potency, scarcely dreamed of even by Gluck, and the influence of music upon the drama has become so important that it naturally has claims to make in regard to the unfolding of its own riches. The drama, then, must enlarge its sphere of expression and the discovery and exploitation of its capacity to respond to the riches of musical expression seemed a possibility to me solely from the musician's point of view. If by so doing I was making a poet of the musician, all the less could I allow him to lose sight of the main end of the drama itself, for his own particular art, music, was but now to be enlisted in the service of this highest of all artistic aims.
His true task must therefore seem to me to be that of becoming fully and inwardly conscious of the riches of musical expression, while desiring nothing but drama, a type of drama, be it understood, which could never come to birth apart from this musical consciousness in the dramatist. To make this perfectly plain I will refer to an important scene in my Tannhäuser, the Song Tournament scene. It is clear that to precipitate the catastrophe by means of this scene in particular, the dramatist's or poet's aspect must, and indeed alone could, be the predominating aspect. To allow the singers to predominate by the arts of song, grace notes and cadenzas would have produced the impression of song competition, but not of a dramatic contest of thought and emotion. On the other hand this poetic warfare, in which the very souls of the participants are at stake, could never, in my opinion, be presented with full dramatic effect without the intense and manifold power of musical expression, and I have been pleased to find that it is just this daringly experimental scene which gets the liveliest and keenest sympathy of the audience at each performance. With it I had the triumph of gripping our very unaccustomed public here through thought and not merely through emotion. Let me summarise shortly. I struck out my line as a musician, who, setting out with the conviction of the inexhaustible riches of music, wishes to follow the highest branch of art, namely the drama. I say wishes to in order to define my aspirations at once. Whether I can do so, I am not in a position to judge, and if I go astray it will be the fault of my feeble capacity, but not of my righteous intention.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 145