[In the following essay, Lindenberger identifies the Ring as “embedded in the world of its time,” while acknowledging the importance of its poetic experimentalism and epic mode of narration.]

Suppose that Wagner had died in 1853, exactly thirty years before his actual death. At this point he would have left behind at least three operas that count for us as major works, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin. Most important for the ideas I hope to develop in this paper, he would also have left behind the libretto for another set of operas, namely the Ring. Early in 1853 he had had fifty copies of this libretto printed privately for friends. Had he died at the time it would surely have been necessary for some propagandist to enter the scene and call attention to the importance of Richard Wagner as a cultural phenomenon. After all, throughout the thirty years of which we have just deprived him, Wagner, among other activities, himself assumed the role of propagandist for his own works—and, one might add, with the most considerable success.

If, let us say, someone other than Wagner had convinced the world of the worth of Wagner's completed operas,¹ scholars would no doubt have made a big thing of the Ring text—to the point, surely, of trying to extrapolate what might have happened musically in those unfortunately never-to-be composed works. At least they would have found the musical sketches that Wagner had made early during the composition of the text—though it is unlikely they could have reconstructed the musical style we now associate with Wagnerian music-drama.² Certainly Wagner would have left a number of tantalizing theoretical writings, above all The Artwork of the Future and Opera and Drama, from which one might have made some informed guesses about the direction in which the composer was going. Indeed, these writings possess such suggestive power that they might well have goaded some other composer to move in this particular direction.

Yet one still wonders what posterity might have made of the 1853 Ring text. This text, let me explain, is very close to the Ring libretto that the real-life Wagner subsequently set to music. Except for minor verbal changes here and there, along with some rewritings of the first act of Siegfried, the only substantive change that Wagner made, as I shall point out later, was in the ending. But my concern at the moment is what we would make of the text if we did not have the completed musical score. Would the text be taken seriously by literary scholars? Would those ordinary readers who enjoy reading plays want to include Der Ring des Nibelungen among the pile of Shakespeare, Racine, and Ibsen dramas they make their way through? Even more telling, would theaters, even those state-subsidized German theaters not subject to the financial risks experienced by companies in the English-speaking world, be tempted to realize Wagner's text on the stage?

It would be hard, I admit, to answer these questions in the affirmative. Without the musical dimension that Wagner intended for his text, the Ring would excite little interest for readers or playgoers. I make this statement in full knowledge that Wagner doubtless attributed a literary value to his text in addition to its role as part of the whole musical-dramatic complex in which it was eventually to take part. After all, he saw fit to print it for his friends and to give occasional readings of it. Although it is unlikely (if we lacked the music) that we would appreciate the text today for its literary value, we might still recognize this text as a strange curiosity, something unlike any other opera libretto. Indeed, I can well imagine that the Ring libretto might retain a minor place in German literary history simply because it seeks a new linguistic mode to recapture the spirit of a lost national past. Whereas Wagner's earlier operas used a fairly conventional language, with the rhyme, meters and diction characteristic of the poetry of their day, even a cursory look at any page of the Ring text tells us we are facing what must be called a serious literary experiment. I open at random to Wotan's words just before the entrance to Walhalla:

Abendlich strahlt
der Sonne Auge;
in prächt'ger Gluth
prangt glänzend die Burg.
In des Morgens Scheine
muthig erschimmernd,
lag sie herrenlos
hehr verlockend vor mir.
(Evening rays flood
the sky with splendour;
those glorious beams
shine there on my hall.
In the morning radiance
bravely it glistened,
standing masterless,
proud, awaiting its lord.)(3)

Note the alliterations—prächt'ger and prangt, herrenlos and hehr, Morgens and mutig. Note also the abrupt shifting of the places that one would expect to hear accents—instead of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, as German poets (including even the anonymous poet of the Middle High German Nibelungenlied) had done for centuries, Wagner has used an entirely different metrical system, and we hear “in des MORgens SCHEINe MUTig erSCHIMmernd.” Moreover, the words that Wagner chooses are based as much as possible on Germanic root words, and he avoids Latinate forms with equal fervor. Anybody reading this text in 1853 would have known that these lines are different at once from the style of German opera librettos and from the styles that German lyric and dramatic poets had been cultivating. Wagner's educated readers would also have recognized that he was consciously imitating the sound of early medieval heroic poetry—in particular the alliterative and accent-based verse of the Old Norse Poetic Edda.⁴

Wagner's metrical experiment, bold though it may be, is of course a manifestation of the medievalism that marks much of the painting, architecture, as well as the writing of the nineteenth century. What he attempted to do with language in the Ring is analogous to the experimentation of a great English religious poet, someone far removed in sensibility though not in time, from Wagner. I refer to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Note the conspicuous alliterations, the strange accent-patterns, and the predominantly Germanic diction of these lines from “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a poem of the mid-1870s:

                                                            It dates from day
                                                  Of his going in Galilee;
                              Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;
                                                  Manger, maiden's knee;
The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat.(5)

Both Wagner's and Hopkins' passages would have seemed strange to their first readers. Like Wagner with the first version of the Ring, Hopkins circulated his poems only among friends, one of whom, Robert Bridges, finally arranged for their publication at the end of the First World War, some thirty years after his death. In both instances, Wagner and Hopkins, one notes an attempt to challenge the reigning conventions of the poetry of their time, and in both cases as well to get literally to the roots of their respective languages. For both poets had faith that in invoking and evoking an earlier form of their language they could get at the roots of things as well as of words. Wagner even discussed alliteration in Opera and Drama—written during the very years in which he was preoccupied with the Ring text—and he expressed his faith that an alliterative poetic language, together with an attempt to select words that reveal their ancient roots, can create an immediacy of communication with its listeners impossible within those styles that derive from later moments in the history of culture.⁶

In some ways my juxtaposition of Wagner with Hopkins may seem unfair. Both passages certainly read like bold experiments even today, and a first exposure in each instance is likely to put the reader off. Yet as one absorbs Hopkins' verse, it comes to read with a rightness that one associates with the greatest poetry. The same cannot be said for Wagner's verse, fascinating though his experimentation with language may be. If Wagner had left nothing more than the 1853 text for us, it is hard to believe that we should have seen it as much more than that—a fascinating experiment. After many readings I must say that, unlike Hopkins' poetry, it does not manage to acclimate itself to the ear. The difference in quality between the two poets can be explained not simply by reference to value terms such as the word greatest that I just invoked (though I am personally convinced that Hopkins was a far better poet than Wagner) but also by the fact that whereas Hopkins' example helped shape much twentieth-century poetry in English (one thinks above all of poets such as Auden, Dylan Thomas, and John Berryman), Wagner's verbal experiments, quite unlike his musical experiments, remained essentially a dead end within the history of German poetry.

Yet while I read through Wagner's lines I know I can bring them to life simply by letting my ear simulate the music he later wrote for them; and it is no accident that those lines in the text that seem the most readable on their own are precisely those whose musical settings are most memorable. As with nearly all librettos, the text of the Ring simply is not complete without the music. I suspect that the praise we customarily mete out to certain librettos—and the Ring libretto has elicited a high degree of praise over the years⁷—derives largely from our admiration for the music that was composed for them and for the total dramatic complex that music, words, and stage action have come to achieve in actual performance. Even those librettos that are very readable on their own—one thinks above all of the ones that Hofmannsthal wrote for Strauss—would probably count as fairly minor if also quite respectable affairs within a purely literary canon.⁸

Thus far I have stressed the significance of the Ring text as an experiment with poetic language—an attempt to restore the linguistic forms of the early Middle Ages to poetry and, as a consequence, to communicate structures of emotion that Wagner associated with this earlier period to his own time. Even if this experiment is not successful without the music that Wagner later wrote for the text, it also links Wagner to certain ways of thinking that we now see as central to his age. During the early nineteenth century the great works of medieval Germanic literature, both those written in Old Norse and in Middle High German, became known to readers for the first time since these early forms of the languages had ceased being used. Indeed, by looking at Wagner's text without the music we are able to see with special clarity how rooted the Ring is within the culture of its own time.

The early nineteenth century in Germany was the great age of what we call philology—a field of inquiry that comprised at once the history of languages and of the literary artifacts that survived in these languages. Being a philologist in the early nineteenth century was to be at the forefront of knowledge—something like being a molecular biologist during the last decade or two, or an atomic physicist in the 1930's or 1940's. During the half century before Wagner completed his Ring text a number of philologists—names as legendary in the field as Jacob Grimm and Eduard Lachmann—had edited and annotated the Old Norse and Middle High German writings on which Wagner based his text, and many of them had also provided translations into modern German so that the general reader could experience these works. Wagner, I might add, made some attempt to master the early languages, though he is also known to have used these translations as cribs. Standing behind the Ring are an uncommonly wide variety of diverse texts stretching across several centuries of writing from Iceland to Germany. The principal texts from which Wagner drew his materials are the Middle High German epic, the Nibelungenlied; two Old Norse heroic prose sagas, the Völsungasaga and Thidriks-saga; and both the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda. But Wagner was not simply seeking out narrative situations, for he also displayed an uncommon intellectual curiosity about the world in which these situations took place.

Philology in the early nineteenth century was what we would today call “area studies,” for it encompassed not simply the language or literature of an area but its customs, its religion, its mythology, its general history. Wagner did not content himself with simply reading what we call “primary texts,” but he read just as avidly in the scholarly literature that was fast accumulating during his day—for example, commentaries such as Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie and Geschichte der deutschen Sprache and Lachmann's Zu den Nibelungen. Considerable effort has gone into uncovering Wagner's own role as philologist—to the point that we now know which books he owned and which he borrowed from the Dresden Royal Library while he was working on the Ring libretto.⁹ Many key ideas that made their way into the Ring did not originate in Wagner's “literary” sources but in the scholarship he read on these sources: for instance, the central role of Wotan's spear was likely suggested by a passage in Wilhelm Müller's Geschichte und System der altdeutschen Religion, while his linking of Siegfried's death with the fall of the gods may well come from a passage in Lachmann's Zu den Nibelungen that challenges this very linkage by an earlier commentator!¹⁰ If Wagner himself, despite his lack of academic training, played the role of philologist, his own achievement in creating the Ring has itself spawned a whole philological industry: indeed, the long series of source studies of the Ring goes back at least to 1875, almost a decade before the composer died and a year before the first performance of the whole tetralogy.¹¹

Let us step back a moment and ask what it must have meant to dig up the national past, to seek a special significance in the way a Wotan established his rule or how a Siegfried sought to give new life to his ancestors' fading empire through his own exemplary and heroic deeds. What we see here is an extraordinary faith in the significance of the national experience at its earliest stages, indeed at its point of origins. This was a peculiarly nineteenth-century idea, and Wagner in writing the Ring participated in, experienced, and propagated this idea to the fullest. Within the framework of this idea a modern individual's imputed ancestors of a millenium before, together with the world they inhabited, achieved a new and quite privileged status.

To those who read the old sagas and epics as they were being reprinted and translated, the world in which they were embedded must have seemed a more “natural” one than the nineteenth-century world of the reader. In the course of the preceding century people had projected a dichotomy between what they saw as nature and what they saw as culture. The most fervent propagandist of this gap between nature and culture was doubtless Rousseau, who, living a century before Wagner, made people question the value of the cultural forms that defined their own, seemingly advanced stage of civilization. In the late eighteenth century Herder popularized the view that the people sharing a particular language retained deep cultural bonds with one another and that these bonds could best be understood through the recovery of the early cultural products of this people—for example, its folk songs and its folk epics.

By the early nineteenth century ideas such as Rousseau's and Herder's had become major factors guiding and motivating the way serious people thought. To get back to the roots of one's national past was to know oneself better; it meant tapping something that seemed more authentic, more elemental than what could be experienced within the all-too-complex cultural forms of the modern world. The early nineteenth century thought not only in terms of origins but also in terms of where these origins could later lead: to grant a special privilege to one's origins is also to place a special emphasis on the evolutionary process that leads from these origins to where we are today.

Origin and evolution are key nineteenth-century concepts, and it is no accident that the most famous of all books tracing evolutionary process should have the word origin in its very title. In this sense the Ring text, even without its music, is a work that we can now see as very much a product of its time. Within this text Alberich's theft of the gold is the moment of origin from which a long series of later events will be generated. These later events then come to constitute the evolution of the human race—or that segment of the race, in this instance the Nordic-Germanic segment, that happened to matter most to nineteenth-century Germans—indeed, if we note the centrality that Wagner achieved within the cultural program of the Third Reich, to Germans until the mid-twentieth century as well.

We can thus see Wagner's reworking of his Old Norse and Middle High German sources as an attempt to embody this new attitude toward origins on both what could be called a “micro” and a “macro” level. On a micro level he evokes early Germanic man by means of the strange linguistic experiment I noted earlier—through the alliterative verse forms, the archaic language (“in prächt'ger Gluth/ prangt”). On a macro level Wagner realizes this idea in the way that he organized his material—beginning as he did with the beginning of things as the Rhine maidens guard their gold and then taking his plot down its evolutionary path through several generations.

It is significant, from this point of view, that Wagner had not originally planned a tetralogy. He started in 1848 with an early form of that text we now know as Götterdämmerung, then called “Siegfrieds Tod.” Before that he had drafted a prose scenario of what was later to be all four plays, and in this scenario he had started with a description of Alberich's theft and had gone on to tell many, though by no means all of the events that were to follow in its wake.¹² Only after the writing of the first version of “Siegfrieds Tod” did he recognize that it wouldn't do simply to start at the end of the story and present early events in retrospective form, as drama within the classical tradition had customarily done. Rather he would have to tell his story by starting with the origins themselves. And thus he worked backwards, moving on to write the text of “Siegfried” before he reached Das Rheingold and Die Walküre.

By the time he was done with the text in 1852 it was clear that this would be no ordinary opera. Wagner had of course announced in one of his theoretical writings during the preceding year that he was going to write no more operas.¹³ But whatever the musical or dramatic form that the Ring was to take, one fact stands out. By encompassing four evenings instead of one, and by speaking out on matters such as the origins and the evolution of the nation, the Ring, in its largeness of scope and its cultural pretensions, seeks out a place for itself different in kind from that of any opera libretto written before it. The earlier form that comes immediately to mind is what we have customarily called “epic,” and I shall attempt to characterize Wagner's undertaking in light of what this term might have meant to him and his age. Despite the fact that the Ring retains the outward form of drama, Wagner's decision to shift from the retrospective form of narrative that originally characterized “Siegfrieds Tod” to one that enacted events widely spaced in time in their chronological order was in effect a movement from a dramatic to an epic mode of narration.

Before writing further of the Ring's relation to epic, I shall digress briefly to speak of the centrality that those works labeled epic have come to claim within Western culture. It is no accident that even today any university course on the “great” works of the past must include one of the two Homeric epics, either the Iliad or the Odyssey, as well as Virgil's Aeneid. Both Homer and Virgil, in their varying ways, have been made to stand at the head of the epic tradition in the West. When we speak of the great epics we do not refer simply to long poems that tell stories—though length and a narrative mode of presentation are central to any definition of the epic. Our understanding of earlier epics encompasses considerably more than these elements, however, for it must also include the type of stories that epics tell and, at least as important, the type of relationship that the epic poet attempts to establish with his listeners or his readers. For the major epic poets, at least as they came to be perceived since the late eighteenth century, saw themselves in a special relation to their communities to whom they were seen imparting knowledge of their own national past and whose future direction and stability their poems intended to influence. Their role within the community often radiated something that would strike us today as a religious aura. In certain respects they came to be seen as comparable to the Hebraic prophets; even if the classical epic poets did not engage in lamentation as overtly as did the prophets, the role they played was considerably closer to that of these prophets than it was to that marginal role a person calling himself poet plays in our society today. The epic poet's special relation to his community is something of which Wagner remained keenly aware, and one cannot fully understand what he was attempting in the Ring without noting that he himself sought to renew and continue this role.

Although I have linked Homer and Virgil as epic poets, and though for most of two millennia they have been lumped together by critics, one must remember that well before Wagner's time readers had become aware of the great differences in the conditions under which they wrote—differences that would of course affect the kinds of relationship they could establish with their later audiences. Since the mid-eighteenth century we have come to think of Homer as a poet of a far more “primitive” age than that of Virgil. The Virgil who emerged during the last two centuries was a sophisticated urban poet who, in his attempt to help stabilize the new regime of his patron, the emperor Augustus, used the conventions and narrative method of the Homeric poems to celebrate and legitimate the ancient Roman past. Like the Homeric poems, many of the early medieval narratives that Wagner read and admired radiated a certain primitive power. They told of heroic feats and of vengeance for unspeakable deeds with an unselfconscious ease impossible within the more sophisticated literature that an urban society would produce. Thus the Aeneid, however well it may imitate the heroic deeds of the Homeric poems, came to be read as a more civilized and self-conscious work than its models. Similarly, the anonymous Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied—works that were not revived until after Homer and Virgil had become separated into radically different categories of epic—exercise their primitive power in a manner that their later imitators, among them of course Wagner, could never hope to emulate.

Not that the writing of even a Virgilian type epic was still possible in Wagner's time. During and after the Renaissance poets in the newly emerging vernacular literatures had sought to emulate Virgil by telling the stories of their own peoples in a deliberately lofty language, the most successful of these efforts doubtless being Camoes' The Lusiads, on the heroic doings of his countryman Vasco da Gama. Otherwise the Renaissance Virgilian epics that remain central within the literary canon—the Gerusalemme of Tasso and Milton's Paradise Lost—are centered in the community of Christianity rather than of nation (though Milton had, of course, originally planned a national, Arthurian epic). Yet both recapture much of the territory that earlier epics had cultivated—by their encyclopaedic range, by their attempt to impart wisdom to their respective communities, by their formal, lofty tone.

By the nineteenth century, although poets throughout Europe often hoped to restore the heroic dimensions of the great epics of the past, they also recognized that an effort of this sort was not only fraught with difficulty but that perhaps it could never be brought properly to fruition. Why, many have asked, had it become impossible to create a great long poem that could rival the epics of the past? Had the high style of language necessary to create a heroic poem simply worn out to the point that it sounded mannered or that it came across as a tissue of clichés? Could heroic deeds solemnly told no longer seem plausible in a world organized according to the new economic and social arrangements that the industrial revolution had brought about?¹⁴ Whether one puts the question in traditional literary terms or sets it within a larger social context, it goes without saying that the type of poem represented by Homer, Virgil, Milton, or such anonymous medieval epics as Beowulf, the Song of Roland, and the Nibelungenlied was no longer possible after the Enlightenment. (It does not seem accidental that by the mid-nineteenth century Virgil and Camoes' epic themes could be realized not in literary but in operatic terms, that in fact the very years that witnessed the composition of the Ring also witnessed the composition of those two epic-minded French operas Les Troyens and L'Africaine.)

When poets after the Enlightenment sought to emulate the epic writers of the past, they were forced into compromises that badly undercut the traditional values and conventions of epic. Wordsworth, for example, though attempting to renew the possibilities of epic, in the end came to celebrate not the deeds of heroic martial figures but the heroism of the individual consciousness. As a result, his major long poem, The Prelude, which he referred to as his poem about the growth of a poet's mind, contains little of the outside world but remains essentially a spiritual autobiography.¹⁵ Byron's epic poem, Don Juan, gave new vitality to the form by using a comic method to question not only the traditional epic conventions but also the very value of heroism.¹⁶

It has often been said that by the nineteenth century, once poetry could no longer support heroic matter, the epic impulse moved into that relatively new genre, the novel, above all into the novels of Sir Walter Scott, who, despite the unheroic matters he was forced to tell because of the conventions that prose narrative imposes, sought to renew the national and communal functions of epic in his long series of novels based on the history of his native Scotland. The young Wagner had in fact been attracted to the heroic potential within the historical novel—if not precisely to the example of Scott, at least to that of his imitator Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose novel, Rienzi, he had turned into a French-style grand opéra. Many years later, while he was working up the energy to begin the composition of Siegfried, Wagner sought relaxation by reading both Byron and Scott. But relaxation rather than inspiration—for in view of the compromises that both Byron and Scott made in order to renew epic tradition, one doubts that Wagner could have noted an analogy to his own efforts in their work.

The difficulties that writers encountered in their attempts to renew epic in the nineteenth century had already, by Wagner's time, been confronted on a theoretical level by Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics. In these lectures a particular genre such as epic does not exist in some ideal, timeless realm but is instead rooted within a particular historical milieu. Thus epic appears within Hegel's theory as the major literary genre within what he calls the “classic” period of art as against, on the one hand, the “symbolic” or “primitive” period, and, on the other hand, that post-classical time that Hegel variously labels “Christian,” “romantic,” and “modern.” Hegel's ideal model for epic remains the Homeric poems, which he analyzes as rooted in a “general world-situation” that can never be recaptured at a later time.¹⁷ Hegel's systematic historicizing of the genres (not only those we label “literary” but those within all the arts) presents a theoretical justification of the difficulties that poets and readers alike had come to feel in continuing the life of epic and other forms that had seemed to flourish and to peak at earlier stages of civilization. From the point of view of the present paper it is significant that Hegel singled out the Nibelungenlied (at the time of his lectures considered by many a central text for inspiring the emerging German national consciousness) as unsuitable for epic treatment in his own time, for the world in which it is rooted, according to Hegel, “has no longer any living connection whatever with our domestic, civil, legal life” (Aesthetics, II, 1057). One might also note that despite Hegel's evident disdain for the Nibelungenlied (as well as for another of Wagner's major sources, the Poetic Edda [Aesthetics, II, 1101]), Hegel concedes that “the whole collision [of the Nibelungenlied] is rather tragic and dramatic than completely epic” (Aesthetics, II, 1103).

If Hegel, in effect, suggests the suitability of the Nibelungen matter for dramatic rather than epic treatment, another philosopher of aesthetics, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, in an essay of 1844 entitled “Proposal for an Opera,” went so far as to provide a scene-by-scene outline of a possible opera on the theme. For Vischer the German operatic tradition from Gluck through Weber had failed to produce a work that was at once heroic and national in character. Although the Ring in no sense followed Vischer's specific scenario (which, after all, was based on only one of Wagner's sources, the Nibelungenlied), Vischer's vision of a heroic, national drama that could utilize music to communicate directly with a modern audience and to soften those crude, medieval aspects of the story that had disturbed Hegel today reads like an uncanny prediction of the project that Wagner was soon to conceive.¹⁸

The movement from epic to drama (and thence to opera) suggested in these remarks by Hegel and Vischer was itself anticipated in a work of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century with which Wagner was much pre-occupied throughout his life. I refer to Goethe's Faust, a text that an uncommonly large proportion of nineteenth-century composers sought to set to music in one form or another¹⁹ and on which Wagner in his youth started to write a symphony (though the one movement he completed in 1840 ended up simply as his Faust “overture”). Like earlier epics, Faust is encyclopedic in scope—to the point that in its long second part its dramatic form can barely contain the masses of material that Goethe sought to accommodate. It is significant that although Goethe had once attempted, unsuccessfully, to write an epic on Achilles, the form he exploited in Faust was not the long narrative poem but a sprawling form of poetic drama. Indeed, it scarcely seems accidental that the term operatic has frequently been applied to characterize what must have seemed to its early readers a conspicuous deviation from classical dramatic form. It is as though by Goethe's time the traditional concerns of the epic could best be accommodated in some dramatic mode of presentation—dramatic but not necessarily theatrical form, for Faust, above all its second part, was in its time very much a reader's play: not until well after its completion—and only after staging techniques had liberated themselves from too literal a dependence on the dramatic text—could it acclimate itself to the German theater.

Certainly Faust could scarcely count as heroic in the old epic sense: Franz Liszt's designation of Faust as a “philosophical epic,” made at the time he was composing his own Faust Symphony (and while Wagner was working on the Ring), suggests the difficulties in establishing its generic status.²⁰ However one might classify this work, the nineteenth century clearly viewed the character Faust's strivings as a peculiarly modern mode of heroism. Wagner was himself impressed by the character Faust's dedication to significant action suggested by his pronouncement “Im Anfang war die Tat” (“in the beginning was the deed”), a line from the play that Wagner quotes twice in the introduction he wrote in 1862 for the first publication of the Ring since its private printing nine years before; a decade later, when Wagner suggests the phrase “ersichtlich gewordene Taten der Musik” (“deeds of music made visible”) as a possible alternative to the generic term Musikdrama, he is doubtless playing on the Faustian motto.²¹ Still, fascinated though he was by Faust, Wagner also expressed some grave reservations about its hero, whose embracing of external, worldly experience as opposed to inward experience went against his own emotional and metaphysical grain.²² In one sense, however, Goethe's poem shares a certain common ground with the Ring, for both culminate in a grand-style, nineteenth-century flourish that represents a peculiarly modern, secularized form of redemption.²³ Yet Goethe's dramatic poem—unlike the Ring, which inhabits a lofty domain allowing relatively little variation of tone—introduces a wide array of forms by means of which it strikes its readers as witty, mercurial, often even improvisatory in nature.²⁴ Although it opened up a whole new genre of what one could call a panoramic form of drama,²⁵ the direction it suggested was not—despite the thematic connections between Faust and the Ring—the one that Wagner chose to follow.

If Goethe demonstrated one direction in which some traditional concerns of epic could manifest themselves in dramatic form, a much earlier dramatic poem suggested a transformation of epic materials much closer to the type of experience that Wagner sought to create for his audience in the Ring. I am thinking of Aeschylus' trilogy the Oresteia, a work that, as a recent book tries to show in detail, Wagner sought to emulate in the Ring.²⁶ Like traditional epic, the Oresteia tells its audience the story of its own people, and it organizes this story in a way designed to show its relevance to the audience's present concerns. As a cycle of plays, it obviously could serve as a model for the Ring; and whether or not Wagner actually modeled the Ring after it, one might remember that he labeled his own work “für drei Tage und einen Vorabend,” as though to remind us that he sought to revive the Greek idea of a trilogy. Moreover, the language of the Oresteia, as Wagner encountered it in Johann Gustav Droysen's contemporary translation, is lofty and heroic in a way that the language of Faust or of Scott's novels could not strive to be. Above all, Wagner could view the Oresteia as a work that did not, like the operas and plays of his own time, merely seek to entertain, but rather as one that could create a communal bond with its audience—and above all by evoking a religious dimension. And fully as important, by viewing (and also representing) himself as renewing the work of a Greek dramatist, Wagner was actively participating in that century-long movement—beginning with Winckelmann's studies of Greek sculpture and culminating in Nietzsche's Wagner-inspired celebration of Greek theatrical experience—which sought to make modern German culture the privileged heir to the achievements of ancient Greece.

For Wagner to renew the possibilities of epic thus meant to create a work analogous to the Oresteia, a work that would reawaken the audience's national Germanic consciousness as Aeschylus' drama had played upon the Greek national consciousness. It would represent events of the greatest magnitude—heroic deeds, acts of vengeance, threats to the communal order, and attempts to restore this order. The Oresteia could also serve as a model in the sense that it did not, like epic narratives, rely on words alone, for its actions were embodied in scenic terms and also used musical resources—though Wagner had no way of knowing what Greek choral chants could really have sounded like. To find his equivalent national materials Wagner had merely to go to the newly revived Old Norse and Middle High German tales about the Germanic gods and the fortunes of their descendants. Not only did Wagner retell these tales, but by imitating the accentual and alliterative verse that he found in the Old Norse poetic versions he also sought to recapture their heroic tone.

Yet what Wagner's audiences saw as heroic in the Ring did not actually come from the language of the texts he wrote. Heroic language could not be convincingly achieved simply by the philological reconstruction that Wagner practiced in writing his libretto. If Wagner had really died right after publishing his text in 1853—to return for a moment to the supposition with which this paper began—we might have granted him considerable respect for his antiquarian activities, but we would never have seen him, as we do today, as the artist who, more fundamentally than any other in the nineteenth century, successfully renewed the possibilities of traditional epic. What was missing in the 1853 text was of course the music. And to give this text its proper heroic dimension Wagner had at his disposal a musical language and structure inherited not from earlier opera but, as Joseph Kerman pointed out in his pioneering book on opera, from the symphony in the form it had been given by Beethoven.²⁷ If Wagner succeeded in restoring the heroic dimension of literature at a time when those who practiced the literary arts had pretty much abandoned this heroic dimension, he did so by fusing a fascinatingly diverse group of elements—the traditional epic poem, the national Germanic themes and the linguistic forms of early medieval heroic tales, the religious and communal experience of the Aeschylean tragic trilogy, and the grandeur and solemnity of the Beethoven symphony.

After more than a century of productions the Ring has acclimated itself so successfully within our consciousness that we can easily forget how unique and strange this fusion of diverse elements actually is. There was nothing intrinsically common to these elements—Greek tragedy, early Germanic heroic tales, national epics, Beethoven's symphonic form—except perhaps the nineteenth-century notion that each of these elements expresses itself in a sublime style—that each, in fact, invokes a mode of thinking distinctly higher than that associated with everyday life in modern middle-class society.

Yet in combining these elements, Wagner obviously created something new, something that nobody could ever confuse with the originals that they imitated or sought to transform. In adapting symphonic form to his dramatic needs, Wagner of course took this form in an entirely new direction, one that could be said to undercut most of the premises on which it had been founded. Similarly this was so with his use of his literary materials. If one reads the various medieval sources that Wagner used for the Ring, one will be struck far less by similarities than by how different these sources look in their new nineteenth-century embodiment. For example, Wagner's method of telling a story is entirely different from that of his medieval sources, however different these may be from one another. In the Ring Wagner supplies some sort of psychological motivation—whether or not we judge it plausible—for every significant action of every character. And if the motivation is not always fully comprehensible in the 1853 text, he later saw to it that his music filled in the psychological gaps.

Everything in Wagner happens in a closely linked chain of cause and effect: Alberich steals the gold because he is greedy and because he feels the Rhine maidens treat him badly, and his theft generates a whole series of actions that make up the plot of the whole tetralogy. Not so in the sources, in which psychological motivation simply does not exist in its modern sense (or even in the ancient Greek sense that Wagner would have learned from his study of Aeschylus' plays) but in which people and symbols and actions simply come and go—often without what we would consider adequate preparation or explanation. The fact that we call the work the Ring and that Wagner gave it the title Der Ring des Nibelungen is itself an indication of the cohesion that Wagner, unlike his sources, sought to give his story. In the sources we find only occasional rings, and they have no necessary connection with one another. Although the Brünnhilde of the Nibelungenlied has a ring that Siegfried steals while wooing her for Gunther, this ring has no connection with a fateful ring owned by a dwarf in one of Wagner's other sources, the Poetic Edda. Thus, the ring in Wagner symbolizes not only such large concepts as greed, power, and fate but, just as important, also the tight narrative cohesion and deterministic structure that in Wagner—and emphatically not in his sources—serves to make sense of the whole.

Moreover, however much Wagner hoped that his audiences would experience their Germanic past by hearing the alliterated Germanic root-words of his text, one very much doubts that the language they heard helped them make contact with this past any more than it would help those modern audiences in various countries who clamor for tickets whenever a Ring cycle is announced. Nor would these root-words help the German audience, any more than it would a modern American one, in achieving an immediacy, as Wagner hoped, with the things to which they are referring. What Wagner reconstructed in his text was a private poetic language, which, though purportedly based on older and related versions of the language his countrymen spoke, as an act of artistic autonomy and as a rejection of existing forms of expression clearly anticipates the various linguistic experiments, a generation later, of Hopkins, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé—to the point that if we had nothing of the Ring except the 1853 text we should be tempted to attach the label hermetic to an artist who longed above all to make his work communicate with his public.

Indeed, the communal experience of the ancient Greek theater that Wagner sought to renew turns out not to have much in common with what the Ring actually succeeded in doing. However well the early Bayreuth audiences may have prepared by reading up on the medieval myths from which the music-dramas they witnessed derived, these myths could not have had the easy familiarity for them that the Greek myths surrounding the Trojan wars had for the Athenian audiences at the Dionysian festival. Indeed, given the strong classical education that Wagner's German middle-class audiences enjoyed until fairly recently, one suspects that these audiences felt a deeper intimacy with Agamemnon and Electra than they did with the ancient Odin (that is, Wotan) or Siegfried. Or perhaps I should put it another way: if his original audiences did not quite feel these myths in their blood, his own achievement served to bring these myths into the German consciousness in the peculiarly nineteenth-century form he gave them; and it is no accident that many late-nineteenth-century Germans (among them, inappropriately enough, my own Orthodox-Jewish grandparents) would give their sons names such as Siegmund and Siegfried.

All of this is only to say something that was obvious all along—namely, that Wagner is very much of the nineteenth century and that the Ring, however much it invokes and reworks the literary past, is a work very much of its own time. Even when it seems to borrow the forms and themes of the past, Wagner gives these forms and themes a peculiarly nineteenth-century and also, one might add, a personal coloring. Certainly one can find an incestuous relationship between brother and sister in the Völsungasaga. But Signy, the original of Sieglinde in the latter work, disguises herself before going to bed with Sigmund, and her motive for joining him is not romantic love but the desire to bear a son of their strain who will be able to avenge their father's death.²⁸ By contrast, the incest we witness in Die Walküre is very romantic—in fact, to judge from the music as well as the text, it is one of the most passionate relationships within the whole history of opera.

Yet incest was a romantic theme for several generations before Wagner, for example in the Gothic novel and in Byron's poetry (not to speak of his life); above all, incest served to titillate its audiences by invoking a universally acknowledged taboo and by its consequent questioning of the value of present-day social conventions that a powerful taboo of this sort can represent in a particularly striking way. Like much nineteenth-century literature and art, the Ring continually expresses a rebelliousness against authority, and it often does so by examining transgressions that occur within personal relationships. The incest of Die Walküre is only one such transgression, a single though extreme instance of that violation of the marriage bond which we also see in the adulterous relationships of Wotan and later of Siegfried.

Adultery, as we know, is one of the central obsessions of the nineteenth-century novel, and as literary critics have come to realize in recent years, this obsession was not simply something that novelists used to tantalize their readers with lurid gossip about private life, but it was also a means of talking about the breach of contracts in a larger sense: the transgression that we call adultery thus became representative of other transgressions that could tell us something about the nature of modern society.²⁹ Within our present context it seems significant that during the very years in which Wagner was composing the music for Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and the first two acts of Siegfried Flaubert was writing that great novel about adultery, Madame Bovary. One hesitates to name Wagner's and Flaubert's projects in the same breath—for what after all can a work with the heroic, mythical dimensions of the Ring have in common with a realist novel that shocked its early readers by means of the frankness with which it confronted the grubbiest details of ordinary middle-class life? If the mid-nineteenth-century novel took the low road, opera in that period, by narrating its concerns in musical form and by representing characters of lofty social status costumed in ways far removed in time from the world of the audience, emphatically sought out the high road.³⁰ Yet the deeper concerns that we find in operas of this time, and certainly in the Ring, are closely related to those of the great novels—above all the transgression against traditional authority, symbolized as it is in both forms by the violation of the marriage contract.

Yet by opting for the high road, the Ring could confront certain problems of its time more directly than could the domestically centered novel. I think of Wagner's concern with the nature of power, above all the relation of power to economic greed. The whole complex drama that transpires between Wotan and the Nibelungen, or between Siegfried and the Gibichungs, points to some central concerns of the time that the novel, to the extent that it concentrated on figures lower on the social scale than those in opera, was forced to approach in a quite different way. However much we may feel that George Bernard Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite, exaggerated the socio-economic meaning of the Ring, we must also grant that relatively early within the history of Wagnerian reception Shaw pointed to a central area of significance from which academic commentators even to this day have largely shied away. Similarly, however strong feelings many may have against directors who change the décor and the stage directions specified by a composer, Patrice Chéreau's attempt to locate the Ring in the social milieu in which it was composed can be taken as an act of contemporary literary criticism that attempts to read a work of art against the world out of which it came.³¹ Indeed, the considerable gap between the heroic dimensions of the Ring and the often unpleasant facts it lays bare about money, sex, and power is itself part of the fascination that radiates from the work and that also locates the Ring squarely in a nineteenth-century world which often covered up its seamier aspects with the most sublime gestures.

Besides the larger statements one can make about the relation of the Ring to the social and economic world of Wagner's time, one can also chart some specific areas that point to the events of his time. Indeed, the changes he made in the ending to the Ring are themselves indicators of his changing views of the world—or, to put it in somewhat more precise terms, of changes in the world that also brought about changes in the way that an artist such as Wagner viewed this world. The 1848 scenario and the first version of “Siegfrieds Tod” end on a note quite consonant with the revolutionary politics that Wagner practiced during that politically fateful year.³² After Brünnhilde's death and the return of the ring, the lower order of Nibelungs are liberated from their bondage in much the same way that the revolutionists of the time sought to liberate the equivalent lower orders of their own time. Indeed, the whole ending celebrates a triumph, for Valhalla in these early versions remains intact and will in fact receive the freshly immolated ex-Valkyrie and her recently murdered consort Siegfried, who, according to the final stage direction, are seen moving together through a glowing sky—an optimistic, romantically triumphant ending that has far less in common with the way Wagner ultimately resolved his tetralogy than it does with the ending of (dare one say it?) La fanciulla del West.

By the time Wagner published his text in 1853, the revolutionary ardor of 1848 had long since passed, and Napoleon III was firmly ensconced as French emperor. Now the ending of the Ring takes a different turn: instead of a liberation of the masses and a transformation of Valhalla, the latter is destroyed and Wotan and the gods all go to their doom. The framework in which we see the events moves from the level of politics to that of personal ethics. Brünnhilde, just before her death, celebrates the coming triumph of love and the breaking of those institutions that impede this triumph. If Wagner is still a revolutionist at this point, he remains so purely through the hope that the ending expresses for a new order of personal relations.

Yet even this ending was not to be the last word. In the following year Georg Herwegh, his fellow-refugee in Zurich, introduced Wagner to the writings of Schopenhauer, and as a result the composer found a rationale for his post-revolutionary feelings of disillusion. (One could also argue that Schopenhauer provided a rationale for the disillusion already quite evident in Wagner's operas of the 1840's.) The triumph of love that Brünnhilde proclaimed in the printed text—combined as it was with a confident prediction that what Wagner called the “iron rule of hypocritical custom”³³ would soon reach its end—now, in fact, gives way, in words added in 1856, to the quietism and resignation that Wagner discerned in Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea, a book published thirty-six years before but, as it turned out, just the right tonic for the composer at this disillusioned moment of history.³⁴ Brünnhilde now speaks of “trauernde Liebe” (“mourning love”) and “tiefstes Leiden” (“deepest suffering”)—though, at Cosima's behest, Wagner never set these added words but decided instead to let the orchestral passages that conclude Götterdämmerung do whatever new ideological work was needed.³⁵

I mention these changes to stress how firmly the Ring, despite its seemingly distant setting, was embedded in the world of its time. Yet I do not mean to say that the Ring simply “reflects” the historical forces surrounding it. Classic works do not “reflect” history so much as they make history—not necessarily political history (though they play their role in this too) but what we have come to call the history of culture, and above all that branch of it that some call the history of consciousness. The things that great works such as the Ring teach us are not necessarily what past times were really like or how particular events in the real world motivate the events we see rendered in art. Rather, art provides us with a framework for rethinking the times in which they were created or for deciding what is peculiar and unique to these times in contrast with other times, above all for connecting things that, to the inhabitants of these earlier times, must have seemed to belong to alien orders.

The Ring, like many of the great novels of the time, has helped define the mid-nineteenth century for us; perhaps one might even say it has helped create a mid-nineteenth century for us. To put it another way, the Ring provides us with a focal point through which we can bring together and make mutual sense out of some quite diverse nineteenth-century events and problems—for example, if I may cite again some of the phenomena I discussed earlier in this paper, the enthusiasm for what people took to be the early medieval Germanic world, or the difficulties encountered by artists in renewing the epic tradition, or the fascination with origins and the need to make tight cause-and-effect narrative connections, or the preoccupation with incest and adultery as modes of transgression, or an artist's need to rethink the ending of his work as he rethinks his attitude toward the historical events taking place around him.

The old notion that art reflects history grants too passive a role to the work of art, at least to a seminal work such as the Ring. Moreover, the historicity I have sought to locate in the Ring lies not simply in the nineteenth-century image that it conjures up but in the meanings it has accumulated through more than a century of interpretation both on the stage and in the study.³⁶ When I attend a Ring cycle I hear both the voice of an otherwise lost nineteenth-century world as well as the long succession of later significations that have stamped themselves upon it—for example, Nietzsche's condemnation of Wagner as “der Künstler der décadence” (“the artist of decadence”) for allowing Schaupenhauer's pessimism to compromise the ending of Götterdämmerung;³⁷ or Adorno's reading of Alberich and Mime as caricatures of Jews;³⁸ or Wieland Wagner's suppression of the traditionally Germanic visual effects in his Bayreuth Ring after World War II;³⁹ or Chéreau's presentation of the Rhine maidens as whores prancing about a hydroelectric dam. Even while thinking myself spellbound at a Ring performance I confess that I do not erase the photo-images in my memory of Adolf Hitler paying his respects to Wagner's descendants at their shrine in Bayreuth.⁴⁰ Through an examination of the Ring's many entanglements past and present all these strikingly diverse matters can assume connections with one another, and they can, in fact, build up a larger image to which we then attach the name history.

Notes

1. For an informed guess on how Wagner might have fared in histories of music if he had died after the completion of Lohengrin, see Arnold Whittall, “Musical Language,” The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner's Life and Music, ed. Barry Millington (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), p. 256. As Whittall puts it, “The triumphs of the three Romantic operas are not to be found in anticipations of later developments but in features more personal to them.” Among these features he cites “the bold juxtapositions of Senta's Ballad” and “the magically sudden transformation from Venusberg to Wartburg.”

2. A considerable amount of scholarly effort in recent years has gone into reconstructing Wagner's process of musical composition in the Ring. From the extant sketches made before 1853—all originally intended for what was then called “Siegfrieds Tod” and dating from 1850—individual musical themes are clearly evident, but the musical styles we associate with the Ring would have been hard to predict. As Curt von Westernhagen, analyzing a passage from an 1850 draft, puts it, “It is unlikely that at that date he envisaged an accompaniment richer than is found in comparable lyrical passages in Lohengrin” (see Westernhagen, The Forging of the “Ring”: Richard Wagner's Composition Sketches for “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” trans. Arnold and Mary Whittall [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976], p. 187, and, for further discussions of the 1850 sketches, see pp. 13-15, 20-21, 82-84, 97, 185-88). Although Westernhagen's reproduction of Wagner's process of composition has been disputed, his view of the musical style of the earliest sketches has generally been accepted. Thus John Deathridge, while challenging Westernhagen's reading of later sketches, describes the 1850 setting of the Norn scene and the subsequent Siegfried-Brünnhilde dialogue as “a rather wan setting in the style of Lohengrin” (see Deathridge, “Wagner's Sketches for the ‘Ring’,” Musical Times, 118 [1977], 385). Similarly, in an earlier study, Robert Bailey describes “the vocal writing in 1850 [as] … representing a continuation of the ingratiating lyrical style of such a passage as the bridal chamber scene in Lohengrin” (see Bailey, “The Musical Sketches for ‘Siegfrieds Tod,’” in Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. Harold Powers [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968], p. 483). See also the discussion of Wagner's use of these early sketches in the Rheingold prelude in Warren Darcy, “Creatio ex nihilo: The Genesis, Structure and Meaning of the Rheingold Prelude,” 19th Century Music, 13 (1989), 81-84.

3. I quote the German from the 1853 edition: Der Ring des Nibelungen: Ein Bühnenfestspiel für drei Tage und einen Vorabend ([Zurich]: E. Kiesling, [1853]), pp. 32-33. The translation comes from Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung, trans. Andrew Porter (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 70.

4. It is significant that Wagner did not attempt a simple metrical imitation of his medieval models. As Carl Dahlhaus explains, “Wagner's lines of Stabreim [alliteration] differ from his old German models in that the number of strong accents is irregular: some lines have two, others three or even four. The consequence is nothing less than the dissolution of musical periodic structure, the syntax that had provided the framework of both instrumental and vocal melodic writing for the past hundred years and more” (Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979], p. 105). In other words, Wagner was using the linguistic forms of what he saw as a lost past not simply to bring this past to life (though this was clearly part of his project), but he was reworking these forms as a means of creating a revolutionary new musical style.

5. Hopkins, Poems, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie, 4th ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 53. There is no evidence that Hopkins was aware of Wagner's experiments while he was writing these lines.

6. Opera and Drama, Pts. 2-3, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Julius Kapp (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, [1914]), XI, 202-04, 238-40, 260-61. On Wagner's occasional use of alliteration in Leubald, a verse drama written when he was fifteen, see Peter Branscombe, “The Dramatic Texts,” trans. Stewart Spencer, in Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), p. 270.

7. After citing the librettos of the Ring, Tristan, and Meistersinger as his greatest achievements in the form, Patrick J. Smith, in his history of opera librettos, states, “Richard Wagner, as librettist, is the greatest the form has produced, and if the libretto needs justification in terms of an artistic identity in its own right, Wagner will stand advocate of its strengths and its possibilities” (The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto [New York: Knopf, 1970], p. 287).

8. A real test for the literary “independence” of a libretto would be its attractiveness to stage directors and audiences even without the music composed for it. As far as I know, among famous librettos only one, Hofmannsthal's Rosenkavalier, has a stage history independent of its music. There are of course librettos based on famous plays—for example, Salome and Woyzeck—whose stage history has continued at the same time that their musical embodiments remained in the operatic repertory.

9. For a detailed study of Wagner's reading during this period, see Elizabeth Magee, Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 1-56, 213-15. For a survey of Wagner's relationship to the Middle Ages, see Volker Mertens, “Wagner's Middle Ages,” trans. Stewart Spencer, in Wagner Handbook, pp. 236-68; the medieval background of the Ring is discussed on pp. 246-54.

10. See Magee, Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs, pp. 185-86 and 204-05.

11. Ernst Koch, Richard Wagner's Bühnenfestspiel “Der Ring des Nibelungen” in seinem Verhältniss zur alten Sage wie zur modernen Nibelungendichtung betrachtet (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, [1875]). Koch's monograph sketches in not only some of the Old Norse sources but also cites many of the early-nineteenth-century lyrics and dramas on the Nibelungs that preceded Wagner's tetralogy—for example, the dramas of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1808) and Ernst Raupach (1834). Scholarly (and often not so scholarly) treatments of Wagner's relation to his sources have continued to appear for over a century. Among the most distinguished is Elizabeth Magee's book of 1990 as well as Deryck Cooke's unfinished I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner's Ring (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979). Since the appearance of Magee's quite comprehensive book a new article has appeared demonstrating the centrality to the Ring of one of the texts from the Poetic Edda, the Völospá: Stanley R. Hauer, “Wagner and the Völospá,” 19th Century Music, 15 (1991-92), 52-63.

12. This prose draft, under the title Der Nibelungen-Mythus: Als Entwurf zu einem Drama, appears in Gesammelte Schriften, VI, 139-50.

13. “Ich schreibe keine Opern mehr,” in Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde (Gesammelte Schriften, I, 173). At this point he chose to use the word drama as a generic label for what was to become the Ring. Two decades later, while working on Götterdämmerung, he rejected the term Musikdrama (which had not originated with him) and suggested instead the term Bühnenfestspiel to stress the festive, participatory form he was seeking (“Über die Benennung ‘Musikdrama’,” in Gesammelte Schriften, XIII, 124).

14. Note Marx's famous comment in the Grundrisse on the impossibility of a Homer in the modern world: “From another side, is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?” (The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker [New York: Norton, 1978], p. 246). At the very time (1857-58) that these lines were written Wagner had virtually finished setting the early, saga-influenced parts of the Ring to music. One might add that he was later to use modern stage technology and, to an extent that no previous composer had done, to renew the life of his seemingly antiquated materials.

15. On the relation of The Prelude to epic tradition, see my book On Wordsworth's “Prelude” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 9-15, 99-129.

16. On the relation of Don Juan to epic tradition, see Jerome J. McGann, Don Juan in Context (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 19-34, 79-99, 102-103.

17. “The General World-Situation of Epic,” in G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II, 1051-62; subsequent references to this edition will be cited within my text. For an argument that Hegel's other writings, above all the Phenomenology of Mind, left an imprint on the Ring, see Sandra Corse, Wagner and the New Consciousness: Language and Love in the “Ring” (Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1990).

18. “Vorschlag zu einer Oper,” in Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Kritische Gänge, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Vischer (Leipzig: Verlag der Weissen Bücher, 1914), II, 451-78. For the sake of dramatic economy, Vischer warns the prospective composer of his Nibelung opera to avoid the mythical events from the Eddas and the sagas that precede the story of the Nibelungenlied (pp. 459-60); similarly, Wagner at first planned to concentrate on what was to become Götterdämmerung and to introduce the earlier events only in retrospect. As Vischer concludes his scenario, he notes that to accommodate all the material he has proposed (which, unlike Wagner's version, includes the whole of the Nibelungenlied) the composer who takes him up on his suggestion may well have to make a two-evening event out of it (p. 478); Wagner, of course, finally settled for four (or, more precisely, three and a half) evenings.

19. For the lure that Faust exercised for composers from Beethoven through Mahler, see my essay “Closing up Faust: The Final Lines According to Schumann, Liszt, and Mahler,” in Interpreting Goethe's “Faust” Today, ed. Jane K. Brown, Meredith Lee, and Thomas P. Saine (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994), pp. 123-32.

20. Liszt's term, which he also applied to Byron's Cain and Manfred and to Mickiewicz's Dziady, appears in his essay of 1855 on Berlioz's Harold in Italy in Gesammelte Schriften, IV (1882), 53.

21. See Gesammelte Schriften, II, 128, 132, and XIII, 123.

22. See Wagner's letter of 7 April 1858 to Mathilde Wesendonck on Faust, above all as this letter is placed within a larger biographical and intellectual context by Peter Wapnewski in his essay “Rivale Faust: Beobachtungen zu Wagners Goethe-Verständnis,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 1984, ed. Christof Perels (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984), pp. 128-56.

23. Hans Rudolf Vaget argues that the redemption at the end of the Ring actually represents a critique of the redemption with which Goethe brings his drama to its end (“Strategies for Redemption: Der Ring des Nibelungen and Faust,” in Wagner in Retrospect: A Centennial Reappraisal, ed. Leroy R. Shaw et al. [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987], pp. 81-104).

24. On Wagner's fascination with, though ambivalence toward, Goethe's achievement in Faust, see the chapter on Faust in Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, trans. Stewart Spencer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 40-47. On Wagner's own idea of improvisation or, more properly, “fixed improvisation,” see the succeeding chapter, pp. 48-58.

25. See my book Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 86-94.

26. See Michael Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus: The “Ring” and the “Oresteia” (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), who not only explains the importance of Aeschylus and Greek drama in general for Wagner's theory of musical theater but also devotes most of his book to a step-by-step comparison of the Ring and the Oresteia. Ewans' stress on the centrality of the Oresteia for Wagner has been challenged by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, who, though agreeing with Ewans on the significance of Aeschylus for Wagner's theory and practice, claims (as a number of earlier scholars had done) that the Prometheus exerted more influence on the Ring than the Oresteia (Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983], pp. 126-42).

27. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (New York: Vintage, 1956), pp. 192-216. On Wagner's appropriation at once of Beethoven's music and reputation, see Thomas S. Grey, “The Beethoven Legacy,” in The Wagner Compendium, pp. 151-53.

28. On the difference between incest in the source and in the opera, see Cooke, I Saw the World End, pp. 297-98.

29. On the cultural significance of adultery, see Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979).

30. On the relationship between what I call the “higher” narrative of opera and the “lower” narrative of the novel, see the chapter “Opera in Novels” in my book Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 145-96.

31. For a description and defense of the Chéreau Ring by its creators, see Pierre Boulez et al., Histoire d'un “Ring,” (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980). For a sophisticated defense of what the author sees as Chéreau's underlying fidelity to Wagner in this production, see Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Tétralogies Wagner, Boulez, Chéreau: Essai sur l'infidélité (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1983). For a summary of this book in English, together with some after-thoughts, see Nattiez, “‘Fidelity’ to Wagner: Reflections on the Centenary Ring,” in Wagner in Performance, ed. Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 75-98.

32. For the endings that Wagner envisioned in the scenario and the early draft of “Siegfrieds Tod,” see Gesammelte Schriften, VI, 149-50 and 192-93 respectively.

33. “… heuchelnder Sitte / hartes Gesetz,” in Der Ring des Nibelungen (1853), p. 158.

34. This addition is printed in Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 286. For a survey of the Wagner-Schopenhauer relationship, see Hartmut Reinhardt, “Wagner and Schopenhauer,” trans. Erika and Martin Swales, in Wagner Handbook, pp. 287-96. For a detailed study of Schopenhauer's impact on the Ring and its relation to Wagner's anti-Semitism, see L. J. Rather, The Dream of Self-Destruction: Wagner's “Ring” and the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 63-109.

35. Westernhagen traces the process by which this ending was composed in The Forging of the “Ring,” pp. 235-40. For an interesting argument that, from a literary if not from a musical point of view, even this ending does not provide a full resolution, see Peter Wapnewski, Der traurige Gott: Richard Wagner in seinen Helden (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1978), pp. 185-97.

36. See the chapter “The History in Opera: La clemenza di Tito, Khovanshchina, Moses und Aron,” in my book The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 85-108.

37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, in Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966), p. 911. For an analysis of what Nietzsche meant by the term décadence in relation to Wagner, see Dieter Borchmeyer, “Wagner and Nietzsche,” trans. Michael Tanner, in Wagner Handbook, pp. 340-42.

38. See Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1981), pp. 20-26. See also Nattiez's connection of this reading with Das Judentum in der Musik (written the year before Wagner drafted the text for Der junge Siegfried and Das Rheingold): “Le Ring comme histoire métaphorique de la musique,” in Wagner in Retrospect, esp. pp. 46-48.

39. For a brief description of Wieland Wagner's Ring as deliberately “anti-fascist,” see Barry Millington, “Staging,” in The Wagner Compendium, pp. 376-77. For assessments of Wieland Wagner's various Ring productions within the history of Wagnerian stagings, see Mike Ashman, “Producing Wagner,” in Wagner in Performance, ed. Millington and Spencer, pp. 40-41, and, in the same volume, Patrick Carnegy, “Designing Wagner: Deeds of Music Made Visible?” pp. 61-65.

40. See Wolf Siegfried Wagner, Die Geschichte unserer Familie in Bildern: Bayreuth 1876-1976 (Munich: Rogner und Bernhard, 1976), pp. 122-25.