MORNING’S SWORD, 2012 

MORNING’S SWORD, 2012 

Pen and ink, wash, white gouache.

16.5 x 11.7 inches. Private collection. 

Wagner himself dreamed a lot and also "interpreted and noticed" very well, because he meticulously recorded his dreams or left their systematic recording in her diaries to his wife Cosima. Almost every morning, the master, who suffered from insomnia, reported on the course of the previous night and described his dreams in detail to Cosima. In his autobiography "My Life" one can also read about his, as he himself admitted, sometimes "vain and haughty fantasies". In addition to such dreams, in which Wagner engaged in casual eye-to-eye intercourse with crowned heads and geniuses, he was frequently plagued by bizarre nightmares: "The other day he dreamed of a tooth that he tore out, showed me, and which became a flaming sword," Cosima's diaries report, for example, on December 25, 1872." [...] 

"Sigmund Freud's doctrine of the unconscious, at least in its broad outlines, now counts as everyday knowledge. Quite a few technical terms of his theory, such as the "complex," have long since migrated into everyday language, and a "phallus symbol" is recognized even by the uninitiated theatergoer on stage without prior introduction."

(From: "The small Wagnerian", Enrik Lauer and Regine Müller, C.H. Beck Verlag)