Excerpt from Thematic Guide Through the Music Parsifal With a Preface Concerning the Traditional, Material of the Wagnerian Drama Those Who have criticised Richard Wagner's dramas have for the most part made the mistake of measuring them, because they treated of ancient German or mediae val legendary materials, according to the standard of already existing Teutonic poems based Ion materials of the same kind. For Tristan, the epic of Godfrey of Strassburg afforded the standard for The Ring of the Nibelungen, the N ibelungenlied. Those Who had perceived that Wagner's Nibelung -poem has but lit tle in common With the Nibelungenlied, brought for Ward instead of the latter the Edda-songs, and treated the new drama as a dramatization of those an cient Skaldic poems Which brought upon our poet the reproach of having forsaken German soil to gather his materials in the foreign soil of Iceland. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.