ABSTRACT
Wagner’s Festspielhaus was born with an open letter entitled “A Communication to My Friends,” at the end of which Wagner announced that he would have “nothing more to do with our theatre of today” and dreamt of a new “myth in three complete dramas, preceded by a lengthy prelude” (1:391/4:343*). This enormous project was not to be an opera or series of operas, but a new form for which the inadequate phrase “cycle of music-dramas” would have to suffice. Such a cycle, Wagner argued, would demand a new theatre, built on radically different aesthetic principles from those that governed the opera houses of the day, a theatre intended solely for the realization and permanent exhibition of the artwork of the future. Here was the first suggestion of what would become, a quarter of a century later, the Ring cycle at Bayreuth.
