bavarikon4UDescription
In this small, elaborately crafted notebook, disparate notes on just ten pages bear witness to Richard Wagner’s (1813-1883) first stay in Paris often marked by hardships between 1839 and 1842. The booklet contains addresses in London and Paris, such as those of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), and names of people he probably wanted to visit, such as those of his then closest friends Ernst Benedikt Kietz, who drew Wagner’s portrait, and Samuel Lehrs, the philologist who encouraged him to study Middle High German poetry. Their result can be found on page 5: the draft of the third act of an opera entitled "Die Sarazenin" (The Saracen). By 1843 Wagner had completed a prose draft for it, but he would never begin the composition.
In The Saracen Wagner deals with the history of the Staufer dynasty, specifically with Emperor Friedrich II and his son Manfred. The work reveals the influence on Wagner of the liberal-minded literati of 'Young Germany' at this time. Friedrich II’s kingdom of peace, which is invoked in the text, therefore appears as the medieval equivalent of Heinrich Laube’s "universal republic". Although the author had already renounced this utopia that overcomes national barriers at the time, for his friend Richard Wagner it is still part of the cosmopolitan "Weltdeutschtum" (German world community), as Thomas Mann calls it, which forms the core of Wagner’s work before national-chauvinist prejudices take hold there.