Richard Wagner, the revolutionist, musical composer, and writer upon æsthetics, has published a new work, entitled Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama), which the German critics fall upon with considerable ferocity. They complain that while he entirely rejects the old form of the opera, he does not indicate what is the new kind of musical drama to be substituted for it. Wagner has also published Three Opera Poems, which the same critics cannot but praise for their originality, power, and inspiration. If the music of these operas is adequate to the libretti, say they, they are really new and grand productions. This would seem, also, to be proved by the fact that one of them has been brought out at Weimar, through the influence and under the direction of Liszt. The author is living in exile in Switzerland, and is engaged upon a dramatic trilogy with a prelude. He no longer professes to write operas, but musical dramas.
An attempt has been made in Germany to register the enormous number of books and pamphlets which the Germans themselves have published on their two great poets, Goethe and Schiller. A catalogue of the Goethean literature in Germany, from 1793 to 1851, has been published by Balde, at Cassel, and in London by Williams and Norgate. The Schiller literature, from 1781 to 1851, is likewise announced by the same firm.
A very excellent translation of sundry old Scottish and English ballads has just made its appearance at Munich, from the pen of W. Doenniger. It contains sixteen Scotch and seventeen English ballads, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, all rendered with great fidelity, and in the true spirit of the original. So successful is the book that a second edition of it is about to appear, with illustrations by Kaulbach, Voltzen, and other eminent artists.
The Augsburg Gazette states that the Congregation of the Index has just prohibited all the works of Eugene Sue and Proudhon; also a clerical Turin paper, called the Buona Novella; a work on animal magnetism, by Tomasi; a manual for schoolmasters, printed at Asti in 1850; and all the works of Gioberti.
A book to be read by the students of literature and by critics is Hettner's Moderne Drama, just published at Brunswick. We do not know of a profounder and keener discussion of the principles and laws of dramatic writing, or of more just and striking dramatic criticisms than it contains.