Some of these were very substantial; for example, Wagner's essays Religion and Art (October 1880) and Heroism and Christianity (September 1881).
From 1880 to 1896 the journal carried extracts from the detailed recollections by Heinrich Porges of Wagner's rehearsal and staging techniques.
The majority were taken from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Arthur Schopenhauer, Wagner, Franz Liszt, Thomas Carlyle, and Martin Luther.
The critic Eduard Hanslick wrote in 1882:For a later age, which will be able to look back at the Wagner epidemic of our days in a spirit of calm evaluation, if also one of incredulous astonishment, the Bayreuther Blätter may yet prove to be of no little cultural-historical significance ...
The future cultural historian of Germany will be able to give authentic testimony, on the basis of the first five volumes of this journal, of how strongly the delirium tremens of the Wagnerian intoxication raged amongst us, and what sort of abnormalities of thought and feeling it occasioned in the 'cultured' people of its time[3]