Poor music! Its usual process of distribution—from composer to performer to audience to academy—has always seemed bad enough, describing as it does the fall from divine inspiration to musicology. But now, as a short but boring session on Richard Wagner at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting made clear, another denouement is horribly possible: the supercession of a composer’s music by his words.

This fate has befallen Wagner many times in the past. Many people might easily feel that the old devil—self-willed and arrogant—had it coming. All his life he took refuge from a giant-sized composer’s block in a persistent and satisfying logorrhea. To some extent his ceaseless writing enabled him to get his compositional thoughts in order; to an even greater extent, one must suppose, it served to take his mind off his manifold financial and artistic problems. Whatever the reasons for his literary production, he wrote on, and the results were vast: the collected (and incomplete) edition of his works in English translation, published from 1892 to 1898, fills eight substantial volumes.

The MLA session was entitled “The Literary Resonance of Richard Wagner’s Social and Aesthetic Theories at the Centennial of His Death.” As listed in the program, the four papers that made up the session possessed if not much at least some interest. There were to be discussions of Wagner’s three short stories, written out of his experiences in Paris around 1840; the relation between Wagner’s theoretical writings and Der Ring des Nibelungen;