¹ A standard reference work reverses this assumption, but in such a way as to enforce the hierarchy even more emphatically: ‘The [musical] works are the key to the writings, not vice versa’. In this version, the writings are superfluous efforts to apply the language of contemporary thinkers (notably the Hegelians and Schopenhauer) to conceptions already fully realised in the domain of the operas, where they really belong. Deathridge, John and Dahlhaus, Carl, The New Grove Wagner (London, 1984), 87.Google Scholar

² There are some musical sketches and a short composition draft for Siegfrieds Tod dating from August 1850, and a few fragments relating to Derjunge Siegfried from die following summer.Google Scholar

³ For all the texts, I have used the only complete English edition: Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. Ellis, William Ashton, 8 vols. (London, 1892–1899).Google ScholarThe stylistic deficiencies of this translation are obvious, but the value of using a comprehensive standard edition (and one that is at least accurate) seems to me to outweigh the occasional embarrassment of Ellis's florid, sub-Carlylean prose. All subsequent citations of volume and page number refer to this edition. I have not provided the original German for prose quotations except when important details of vocabulary or phrasing are required.Google ScholarThe standard edition of the prose is Wagner, Richard, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 2nd edn, 10 vols. (1887–1888; rpt. Hildesheim, 1976). I have retained the original orthography in forms such as ‘Mittheilung’, ‘Noth’ etc. in the interest of accurate reference to these and other editions.Google Scholar

⁴ To read the prose works together with the Ring text is in itself to acknowledge a deb to Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who first proposed ‘une abolition de la frontière entre l'ecrit théorique et le texte poetique’. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, ‘Le Ring comme histoire métaphorique de la musique’, in Wagner in Retrospect, ed. Shaw, Leroy R., Cirillo, Nancy R. and Miller, Marion S. (Amsterdam, 1987), 44.Google ScholarA full reading along these lines appears his Wagner Androgyne, trans. Spencer, Stewart (Princeton, 1993).Google Scholarwhere he breaks open the relation between prose and poem, so that instead of referring only to one another, their shared content exposes a continuing and flexible line of interpretative enquiry. But his concern to account for twentieth-century interpretations of Wagner leads him away from a more fundamental question about the Ring poem: what are the conditions of interpretation of this incomplete and unperformed work?Google Scholar

⁵ SeeNewman, Ernest, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols. (1937–47; rpt. Cambridge, 1976), II, 37–40.Google Scholar

⁶ For Ellis's translation of Siegfrieds Tod, see VIII, 1–52. While I have used English titles for Wagner's prose works, all opera tides – including Siegfrieds Tod (The Death of Siegfried) and Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried) – are cited in their familiar German form.Google Scholar

⁷ Spencer, Stewart and Millington, Barry, ed. and trans., Selected letters of Richard Wagner (London, 1987), 171. This useful edition is hereafter cited as Letters.Google Scholar

⁸ In letters to Liszt (5 June) and Minna (8 June): Letters, 171, 172.Google Scholar

⁹ The essay's concluding rhapsodies on ‘love’ link it to Wagner's abortive affair with Jessie Laussot, which reached crisis point in April and was over by June. He interpreted the incident as a microcosm of revolutionary longing thwarted by bourgeois society.Google Scholar

¹⁰ A fascinating essay on the significance of the ‘water-cure’ for both the Ring itself and the idea of Bayreuth is Vogt, Matthias Theodor, ‘Taking the Waters at Bayreuth’, in Wagner in Performance, ed. Millington, Barry and Spencer, Stewart (New Haven, 1992), 130–52.Google ScholarFor a full account of the various stages in the composition of the poem, see Strobel, Otto, Richard Wagner: Skizzen und Entwürfe zur Ring-Dichtung (Munich, 1930).Google Scholar

¹¹ The tides were not changed to Siegfried and Die Götterämmerung until 1856. Since the texts of both operas were altered in the intervening period, I have retained the 1853 titles throughout.Google Scholar

¹² For a more comprehensive account of these much-studied ideas than can be given here,see Borchmeyer, Dieter, Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, trans. Spencer, Stewart (Oxford, 1991) – substantially revised from the 1982 original, Das Theater Richard Wagners.Google Scholar

¹³ The word is translated by Ellis and others as ‘Folk’, but the register of ‘Volk’ is nearest to ‘the People’, in the sense in which politicians use that word.Google Scholar

¹⁴ An account of the specific notions of individual and social progressiveness that Wagner inherits from Hegel and Feuerbach is beyond the scope of my discussion; the relevant point is that the revolution, however conceived, becomes inseparable from performance of the Ring. On the Hegelian influences on the tetralogy, see Corse, Sandra, Wagner and the New Consciousness: Language and Love in the ‘Ring’ (London, 1990), 16–41.Google Scholar Adorno's influential book also examines the Ring's articulations of revolutionary thinking:see Adorno, Theodor, In Search of Wagner, trans. Livingston, Rodney (Manchester, 1981). Both authors tend to bypass the theoretical works, so losing the most direct connection between the drama itself and the intellectual context they seek to place it in.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Compare a letter to Liszt of July 1850: ‘All that we create as poets and composers expresses a wish but not an ability, only the performance itself reveals that ability or art’ (Letters, 210).Google Scholar

¹⁶ From Opera and Drama.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The phrase ‘dichterische Absichf is ubiquitous in Opera and Drama; Ellis tends to translate it as ‘poetic aim’. See Glass, Frank, The Fertilising Seed: Wagner's Concept of the Poetic Intent (Ann Arbor, 1983).Google Scholar Other useful studies of Opera and Drama in English are Stein, Jack M., Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts (Detroit, 1960);Google ScholarSkelton, Geoffrey, Wagner in Thought and Practice (London, 1991).Google ScholarSee also Nattiez, , Wagner Androgyne, 12–42, and his answer to Stein and Glass, 173–8.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Corse (n. 14) notes that mutual recognition is a key element in the Hegelian ideal of society (32–3), but she limits her discussion to the relationships of love in the Ring itself.Google Scholar

¹⁹ The first version of A Communication to My Friends, sent to the publishers before Wagner's crucial visit to Albisbrunn, did not conclude with this announcement. A publication hitch gave him time to revise his ending.Google Scholar

²⁰ The details can be read in various letters of September 1850 to November 1851: see letters, 216–17, 219, 230, 234.Google Scholar

²¹ The text published in 1853 concludes with lines different from both first and final versions. The text of the so-called ‘Feuerbach ending’ is given in Spencer, Stewart and Millington, Barry, ed. and. trans., Wagner's ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ (London, 1993), 362–3.Google Scholar

²² Newman (n. 5), II, 281–2. Newman cites Paul Moos's 1906 Richard Wagner als Aesthetiker as another commentary in which the problem is noted. It has therefore been part of the critical current for at least ninety-odd years, but as far as I know it has not heretofore been thought interesting.Google Scholar

²³ For an interesting critique of the ideology of this internalisation, see Cormack, David, ‘Wagner the “Communist”’, in Wagner 1976, ed. Spencer, Stewart (London, 1976).Google Scholar

²⁴ The pseudo-Germanisms of EUis's style are particularly well exemplified in this passage, though it does also illustrate the virtue of his version: it may b e comical, but it is at least clear.Google Scholar

²⁵ Compare a letter of May 1851: ‘And never again shall I have to envisage a general, abstract audience, but a specific public to whom I can communicate my intentions direcdy in order that I may be understood by them’ (Letters, 223).Google Scholar

²⁶ Emphasis added.Google Scholar

²⁷ The reading of Siegfried's death as an atonement is very clear in the 1848 ‘Nibelung Legend’ sketch: ‘Guiltless, he has taken the guilt of the gods upon him, and atones their wrong through his defiance, his self-dependence’ (I, 308).Google Scholar

²⁸ In the sense of a paradox about hermeneutics, I should stress. Wagner's problem is not with his own position as an interpreter, but with the interpretability of his work.Google Scholar

²⁹ The most notorious example of all is the growth of the Ring tetralogy out of an urge to supply the prehistory of each extant drama. Carolyn Abbate points out that the backwards evolution of the Ring was actually supposed to obviate the need for narrative (by staging what had previously to be recounted); but she also makes the crucial observation that in fact the many long scenes of narration were retained as the text grew. See Abbate, Carolyn, Unsung Voices (Princeton, 1991), 156–61.Google Scholar

³⁰ This is not, however, to ‘excuse’ Wagner's anti-Semitism as a mere offshoot of his personal and professional hatred of Meyerbeer. Paul Rose argues that Wagner's programmatic hatred of Jews dates from a particular episode of anger with Meyerbeer in 1847, and therefore coincides precisely with his discovery of revolutionary nationalism. Although Rose's evidence is not entirely convincing on this and other points, he demonstrates that anti-Semitism is always a significant part of Wagner's political and theoretical discourses. See Rose, Paul Lawrence, Wagner: Race and Revolution (London, 1992), 40–8 and passim.Google Scholar

³¹ Nattiez (n. 4), 12–42.Google Scholar

³² Wagner seems to have discovered the Hegelian conception of necessity in his reading of Phanomenologie des Geistes ( The Phenomenology of Spirit) during his Dresden years. See Windell, George, ‘Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner's Ring, Central European History, 9 (1976), 27–57. and Corse (n. 14), 19–25. For my use of the orthographic variants ‘Noth’ and ‘BediirfniB’, see n. 3 above.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³³ The prevalence of such eroticism in Opera and Drama has been exhaustively analysed by Nattiez (n. 4), 34–40.Google Scholar

³⁴ Corse (n. 14), 38–41, argues that Wagner thinks of ‘love’ as an instinctive psychological impulse expressed through male-female relationships; a reading of the theoretical works, however, suggests that its range is broader.Google Scholar

³⁵ The occasion of this letter was an erroneous newspaper report announcing that the death sentence on the two revolutionaries had been confirmed.Google Scholar

³⁶ The ‘decision’ is her planned elopement with Wagner.Google Scholar

³⁷ The plan for publication came to nothing, though the introduction is printed in Wagner, Richard, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 16 vols. (Leipzig, 1911–1916), XVI, 84–5.Google Scholar

³⁸ The usual explanation is that Wagner had to outline the difference between his published theories and the operas he had written so far; but this does not explain why t he relatively straightforward disclaimer should be embedded in an attack on ‘monumental’ art and a long autobiographical narrative.Google Scholar

³⁹ ‘in selbstschöpferische Freiwilligkeit die Fülle von ermöglichenden Bedingungen ibm ersetzen’.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ In the text of 1853, Brünnhilde's final speech is directed straight at the audience: ‘Ihr, blühenden Lebens / bleibend Geschlecht: / was ich nun euch melde, / merket es wohl! [You, blossoming life's / enduring race: / heed well / what I tell you now!]’: Spencer and Millington (n. 21), 362. All quotes from the Ring poem and its translation are from this edition, hereafter cited in the text by page number only.Google Scholar

⁴¹ In the 1853 edition, the god is called ‘Wodan’; I have ignored this trivial distinction in my discussion.Google Scholar

⁴² Abbate (n. 29), 156–61. A brief interpretation of the effect of the Rings, narrations may be found in Daverio, John J., ‘“Total Works of Art” or “Nameless Deeds of Music”: Some Thoughts on German Romantic Opera’, The Opera Quarterly, 4 (1987), 71–2.Google Scholar For an interesting interpretation of narrative as quotation, see Corse, Sandra, ‘The Voice of Authority in Wagner's Ring, in New Studies in Richard Wagner's ‘The Ring of the Nibelung’, ed. Richardson, Herbert (Lewiston, NY, 1991), 19–38.Google Scholar

⁴³ Corse's article (n. 42) similarly defines quotation as the way a character establishes his or her relation to words previously spoken. She interprets this formal quality of narrative as a way of investigating the authority of various different speakers within the poem. When narration is not quotation, however, the question of the validity of voice becomes less important than the quality of vocalisation itself.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Abbate (n. 29), 222.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Abbate, 223.Google Scholar