This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1853 edition. Excerpt: ...for an artistic enterprise, which I should dedicate to you and to those of my friends comprised in " the local idea: Weimar." The timidity of Messrs. Hartel, the publishers of the book, has taken exception to certain passages in that preface to which I did not wish to have any demonstrative intention attributed, and which I might have expressed just as well in a different way; and the appearance of the book has in consequence been much retarded, to my great annoyance, for special reasons. For the public declaration as to the intended destiny of my next dramatic work would, owing to my latest resolution, require an essential modification if it were to be quite in accordance with actual circumstances. But, although the preface, written at the beginning of last August, appears in the present circumstances too late, the aforesaid declaration will be given to the public without any change; and if I cannot fulfil the promise given in it in the manner there stated, it may at least serve you and my Weimar friends as a proof of the genuine sincerity of the intention then held by me. I should also be glad to think that in that public declaration I have furnished a sign of my gratitude for the sympathy they have shown to me, even if, as I said before, I cannot prove that gratitude in the exact manner there promised. To you, my dear Liszt, I am now compelled to confess that my resolution of writing a new opera for Weimar has been so essentially modified as scarcely to exist any longer in that form. Hear then the strictly veracious account of the artistic enterprise in which I have been engaged for some time, and the turn it had of necessity to take. In the autumn of 1848 I sketched for the first time the complete myth of the Nibelungen, such as it...