His career as a dramatist very probably began by collaboration with other authors.
But with Der Ring des Nibelungen Wagner devoted himself to a story which any ordinary dramatist would find as unwieldy as, for instance, most of Shakespeare's subjects; a story in which ordinary canons of taste and probability were violated as they are in real life and in great art.
Here Henrik Ibsen, the dramatist, was born in 1828.
The complicated plot is constructed with greater skill than is usual with this dramatist, and the pathos of particular situations, and of the entire character of Penthea - a woman doomed to hopeless misery, but capable of seeking to obtain for her brother a happiness which his cruelty has condemned her to forego - has an intensity and a depth which are all Ford's own.
Again, the appeal to " God's judgment " in the trial by battle in Lohengrin is a subject of which no earlier librettist could have made more than a plausible mess - which is the best that can be said for the music as music. But as dramatist Wagner compels our respect for the power that without gloss or apology brings before us the king, a model of royal fair-mindedness and good-nature, acquiescing in Telramund's monstrous claim to accuse Elsa without evidence, simply because it is a hard and self-evident fact that the persons of the drama live in an age in which such claims seemed reasonable.