Richard Wagner's stage debut "Die Feen" on June 20th, his "Parsifal" on July 14th - Leipzig's "Wagner-Marathon" will move between these key dates: all thirteen Wagner operas in a row in those productions that the local opera with its conducting director Ulf Schirmer, has been increasing bit by bit for over fifteen years until they can now be heard in their entirety for the first time.

The three early works excluded from the Bayreuth canon will also be included.

The extraordinary festival includes an extensive supporting program, most of which takes place in the Old Nikolai School, where Wagner attended high school between 1828 and 1830.

At this only authentically preserved Wagner place in his birthplace, there is now a permanent exhibition on his youth as well as discussions, readings and concerts.

Albert Gier is also there.

As a Romance philology professor in Heidelberg, Frankfurt am Main and Bamberg for 32 years since 1984, he has also worked intensively for decades on librettology, the science of opera and operetta texts - and one comes to the Saxon music revolutionary Wagner of course not around in such a field.

Mr. Gier, even Wagner freaks who still listen ecstatically to the sounds of the “master” sometimes have problems with his texts, which he wrote himself from the start.

The Rhine daughters at the beginning of the "Nibelungen" tetralogy - "Wallala weia weia!" and the like - even seem suspicious to some people ...

Yes, I know.

And then later Fafner, when he demands that you "jammed the blade".

But if you look into the matter, you will see that the word – it stands for a narrow crack or gap and incidentally also occurs in one of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s German translations of Shakespeare – was very common in Saxon.

But Wagner didn't want to deliver Saxon dialect poetry!

No, he was concerned with an archaic German that should fit into his stage actions that date back a long way and even reached into the mythical.

Surprisingly, he received his first suggestions for this in distant Paris.

They came from the philologist Samuel Lehrs, who had settled on the Seine as a private scholar and translator and, between 1839 and 1842, first referred Wagner, who was desperately struggling for a secure existence, to the Middle High German circle of sagas from which "Tannhäuser", "Lohengrin" and everything that follows should grow up.

Surely both of them could have imagined that the opera capital of the time, Paris, was not longingly awaiting German-language music stage poetry?