English Translation

9.g Earth, and was not to be moved by my astonishing friend for a long time to walk on... - Both documents are proof enough of how strong and profound the overwhelming and always new impression of the castle-dominated urban landscape of Prague has entered into the shaping world of Richard Wagner's imagination. He came from the plain and from a circle of life, whose image was essentially determined by baroque elements, and took up the unique experience of a city already spacious and expanding into the moving countryside, in which enormous testimonies of medieval and baroque architecture combined into an unheard of closed unity. And the "poetic magic" with which the beauty of this city, which was created from German architectural thinking and urban planning and from the German spirit, captivated the young artist's soul filled with musical and poetic ideas, wrestling around the design, probably also played a decisive role in a higher sense in the early living and fruitful relations between the work of the master and the great music and theatre community of this town. The first visit of the musician, who was only nineteen years old, but had already been created, was in the autumn of 1832. At that time, the founder and first director of the Prague Conservatory, Dionys Weber, published the first performance of Wagner's compositions with the orchestra of his institution. Pleasant personal relations kept alive the memory of this early contribution by Prague to the fortification of Wagner's artistic self-awareness. They were renewed during a short visit in the summer of 1843, in the middle of the work at the "Tannhäuser".