Tannhäuser: German–English Side-by-Side Libretto

This week I completely revisited the German–English side-by-side libretto of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser on LibrettoArchive.

What initially seemed like a small revision became a much larger restoration and editorial project. Over the course of the week, I corrected dozens of mistakes in both the German and English texts, fixed OCR and formatting problems, revised translations, and translated many stage directions that had previously remained untranslated — especially Wagner’s detailed italic stage comments throughout the opera.

The libretto had been available on the website for a long time, but it was far from perfect. Many errors originated from old scanned public-domain sources and accumulated over time: missing umlauts, OCR distortions, broken formatting, merged words, incorrect spellings, and translation inconsistencies.

Among the corrected issues were:

• “Gelobt sei, Jungfrau” corrupted as “Gelobt sie, Jungfrau”
• “Wahnsinniger!” printed as “Wahsinniger!”
• “der Landgraf” appearing as “der Landraf”
• “aus grosser Ferne” corrupted as “aus grosser Ferme”
• untranslated or incomplete stage directions throughout all three acts
• multiple English typographical and grammar corrections
• formatting artifacts accidentally left in the text

Many of Wagner’s stage directions required careful retranslation and editorial cleanup. Some passages were unclear due to damaged OCR text, archaic spelling, or inconsistent older translations. Considerable effort went into restoring clarity while preserving the dramatic atmosphere and tone of the libretto.

The revised Tannhäuser is now available online together with a paperback edition and PDF preview.

This was one of the most time-consuming libretto revisions I have worked on so far, but also one of the most rewarding. Wagner’s stage directions are extraordinarily detailed and theatrical, and presenting them clearly in a bilingual format required much more editorial work than I originally expected.

Read the updated libretto here:

www.LibrettoArchive.com/Tannhäuser_libretto_German_English

The updated paperback edition is available at Amazon.com
PDF preview is also available.

— Dmitrii Murashev