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With Wagner you can always assume that he saw himself

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in one or other of his figures.

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Particularly Lohengrin, the misunderstood artist, Tannhäuser,

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who really doesn’t fit into this society,

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who is always an outsider. Now we’ve arrived at the topic

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of “Alienation”, belonging and alienation.

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… or the Dutchman, who also doesn’t belong

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and is foreign, and who is waiting for redemption.

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Now we’ve come to the female characters:

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Kundry, who doesn’t feel she belongs anywhere,

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in any of the worlds, and awaits her salvation.

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Tristan and Isolde are a cosmos in themselves, which means

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they also don’t belong in their surroundings.

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There, too, is something very foreign.

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But of course, he is actually re-inventing

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German Romanticism or trying to have it

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culminate for the first time in the opera.

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You can see this in his philosophical writings

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especially in “Opera and Drama”,

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how he sees that as a failed project.

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Sort of as if one has been ambushed.

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Of course, that has very, very much to do with the reaction

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after the Napoleonic Wars and so on,

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as if one were not in a position in Biedermeier style,

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so to speak, to shoot out beyond

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the Italian opera in order to bring the true –

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and here it gets difficult –

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German essenceonto the opera stage, although he

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sees that it manifested itself completely in Freischütz, for example.

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And that, of course, is extremely painful

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and unfortunately still highly charged and topical,

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that it is time after time about “Ahasver”,

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about the “Ahasver” theme, i.e., about the individual

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who is too big for this world and the world

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that is too small for the person, and

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that he keeps trying through this magnifying glass to

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call the options into question …

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One thing is that Richard Wagner can somehow really be

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recognised in his self-alienation and I believe this

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is actually his main concern,

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quasi from the depth of this anguish,

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to play with the architecture of fear.

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This playing with reality or with this alienation –

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I find it terribly cleverly reflected.

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Especially when we are talking about Tannhäuser,

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which is also a work

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which continued, so to speak, to trouble him and

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which allowed him in his self-alienation to undertake

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very constructive new paths,

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and after the language of Tristan,

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a new Venusberg emerges where he suddenly pulls this dialectic –

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this inextricable dialectic in the play – over the work

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itself and leaves it behind in a condition

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that leaves us completely perplexed,

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because it simply makes one thing clear:

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This task …, we stand here before two polemic,

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dialectical realities

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which only in this contradiction about the right

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to must have this juxtaposition actually make art possible.