SOURCE: Daverio, John. “Wagner's Ring as ‘Universal Poetry.’” In New Studies in Richard Wagner's ‘The Ring of the Nibelung,’ edited by Herbert Richardson, pp. 39-53. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Daverio discusses the unifying structure and technique of the Ring operas.]

The text which serves as the point of departure for this essay is the 116th of the fragments published in the Athenäum (1798), a short-lived but highly influential journal founded by Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm. Although Friedrich Schlegel's name does not surface too often in discussions of music, he is considered by most literary historians to be the intellectual father of German Romanticism, and in Fragment 116 he presents a microcosmic account of the new Romantic programme. There he imagines a “progressive, Universal Poetry” that would “reunite all of the separate genres of literature,” “bring poetry together with philosophy and rhetoric,” and finally “mix and fuse poetry and prose, spontaneous creativity and studied criticism.”¹ I have already suggested elsewhere that Schlegel's prescriptions represent a remarkable literary analogue for the realization of similar goals in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen;² here I would like to focus on Schlegel's statements relative to the form that this “Universal Poetry” should take, for they have an important bearing on our apprehension of the form of Wagner's tremendous musical myth. Schlegel's “Universal Poetry” is meant to embrace “the greatest systems of art, that contain within themselves yet further systems”; it should criticize or comment upon itself as it proceeds, as if to “multiply its self-reflection in an infinite series of mirrors”; and thus it is “capable of the most universal attainments, because it organizes all of its parts along the same lines as the resultant whole.”³ The last two phrases are the most crucial for our purposes, for they describe with prophetic vision the technique that Wagner employed to unify his massive tetralogy. More important than matters of leitmotivic recall or tonal disposition is the complex of large-scale recurrences, continually varied and fashioned anew, that serve as the musical pillars of the Ring dramas.

Others have suggested something similar. D. F. Tovey once noted in passing that symphonic recapitulation counts for much more in Wagnerian music drama than does the wearisome, and pointless task of motive labelling.⁴ But the notion of symphonic recapitulation—a kind of resolving repetition—is far too narrow to account for Wagner's procedures, involving as they do intensification, compression, or the recasting of old material mingled with the presentation of new ideas (a process which Wagner termed “rhetorical dialectics”⁵). In fact, it was this limited brand of recapitulation that Wagner censured in Beethoven's Third Leonora Overture.⁶ And while other studies have centered on the importance of recapitulatory gestures in restricted portions of the Ring dramas,⁷ it remains to be shown, in a more comprehensive way, to what degree each single part is mirrored in the total conception.

In addition, by pointing out some of the literary precedents for the organizational aspects of The Ring, we might be able to place it within the broader context of those preoccupations that cut across music and literature in the nineteenth century. For if Beethoven's symphonies (in particular, the Ninth) were the crucial musical impulse for The Ring, then no less crucial was what I will propose as Wagner's principal literary model: Goethe's great Bildungsromane, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and its sequel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Goethe's Lehrjahre is also the work in which Schlegel's utopian demands for a “Universal Poetry” found practical application; his Meister review (1798), written with all the detachment of a practiced critic, is as analytically precise as the 116th Athenäum fragment is rhapsodic. But again, Schlegel's characterization of Goethe's Meister as a thoroughly organic creation, one whose main sections are determined “by the free variation, reshaping, and transformation of what has gone before,”⁸ reads like a bit of divinatory criticism directed at The Ring.

If music and literature converge at the level of form, it is because the composers and poets of the nineteenth century felt the need for what Schlegel, in his “Gespräch über die Poesie” (1800), called a “new mythology.”⁹ But whereas Schiller in his poem “The Gods of Greece,” or Hölderin in his “Bread and Wine,” or Rilke in the Duino Elegies mourned the passing of the ancient gods, and of Homer and Aeschylus, Wagner's lamented deity was of more recent standing. In addressing the question that weighed upon all Romantic composers—What are we to do after Beethoven?—Wagner felt compelled to create anew, in The Ring, Tristan, Meistersinger, and Parsifal, a self-sufficient mythology of music. The task involves a paradox, for if creation anew requires the spontaneously imaginative, then mythology demands the universally recurrent. And by subjecting his highly individualized motivic complexes to a continual series of varied transformations en masse, by universalizing the particular, Wagner found his way out of the dilemma.

II

Wagner's claim, in a letter to Karl Gaillard of 30 January 1844, to the effect that the music and text of his works were conceived simultaneously,¹⁰ has caused no end of trouble. Indeed, studies of his sketches and drafts have shown that it is a terrible mistake to assume that the textual and leitmotivic substance of The Ring came to Wagner at a stroke, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus.¹¹ What can be taken at face value is Wagner's assertion, in a letter to Liszt of 11 February 1853, that the form of the Ring music was completely finished within him before he had written a note of Rheingold,¹² for the musical form was suggested by recurrences that Wagner had built into the text. He undoubtedly realized the musical potential of his text at the very start, that is from his work on “Siegfrieds Tod” in 1848/49, for its various narrative episodes (ostensibly written to provide a mythic background for the heroic tragedy) already tend to repeat themselves. And this process was to be continued as Wagner worked backwards through the Ring poem, from the epic narratives in Götterdämmerung/“Siegfrieds Tod” (those for Waltraute in Act I, Siegfried in Act III, and the Norns' scene), to the Wanderer scenes in Siegfried, to Wotan's monologue in Walküre, Act II, scene 2, and finally to Loge's narrative in scene 2 of Rheingold. Had Wagner not considered the musical possibilities of these narratives at the outset—especially their potential as recreative recapitulatory centers—he would have shortened or eliminated them altogether.

While the narratives serve as important pillars of the musical structure, the form of the whole is determined by relationships between and among various “centers of attraction” (to borrow a phrase from Rudolf Stephan¹³). These centers may be devoted to the dense elaboration of a “new” motive or series of motives (e.g., the Valhalla music that opens Rheingold, sc. 2); or the sketchy presentation of motives that will only be developed fully at a later point (e.g., the “elemental” Prelude to Siegfried, Act I); or to the expansive treatment of old material interwoven with new (as in the climactic Finales of each of the Ring dramas); or to a condensed treatment of great stretches of music that were at first widely separated (as in the epic narratives of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung). Let us now consider how these pillars function in each of the dramas in turn.

In Rheingold, the relationship among the centers of attraction is particularly clear. It is perhaps a commonplace to maintain that the shape of the first drama, an introductory scene followed by three others, mirrors the structure of Götterdämmerung—a Vorspiel and three acts—which in turn mirrors the whole, a “preliminary evening and three days”; but the shape of Rheingold is in large measure determined by a recapitulatory gesture. Its last three scenes emerge as a kind of Bogen or arch form in so far as the last 160 measures or so of scene 4 are largely devoted to an expanded treatment of the Valhalla music that opens scene 2 (generously mixed with references the Rhinemaidens' music from sc. 1). The Bogen effect is enhanced by the contrasting quality of scene 3 in Nibelheim. The keystone of the arch is again set off by an extended recurrence: both of the orchestral interludes that surround the scene work out the same material, but in reverse order. After all, the first interlude is meant to depict Wotan's and Loge's descent to Nibelheim, the second their ascent to the mountain heights near Valhalla. These recurrent allusions may act as the principal pillars of the music drama, but there are others that disturb the clear-cut symmetry of the overall Introduction and A B A form: most notably the recreation of the Vorspiel music (especially from bar 49 on) in the Erda episode in scene 4.¹⁴

Rheingold likewise contains the germs of much that will follow, germs planted in a most systematic way. Thus, Loge's entrance music in scene 2 points to the Magic Fire music in Walküre (while his subsequent narrative recalls the Rhinemaidens' material from sc. 1, and in addition foreshadows the epic narratives of the later dramas); Mime's lament in scene 3 (“Sorglose Schmiede”) prepares us for the closed Lied forms that figure in Siegfried, Acts I and II; and Erda's soliloquy in scene 4 prefigures both the Wanderer/Erda exchange in Siegfried, Act III, scene 1, and the Norns' scene in Götterdämmerung. Therefore, we already find in Rheingold a dense web of allusions (many of large proportions) and systematically disposed premonitions; the technique which informs the whole is fully developed in its first part. And while Wagner's style had clearly deepened and matured when he returned to The Ring after a twelve-year hiatus to compose the last act of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung—particularly as regards the handling of chromaticism—his basic methods of large-scale organization remained basically unchanged.

Walküre hinges on the progression between two main centers of attraction, the climactic conclusions of Acts I and III, with the central scenes of Act II as a kind of pivot. Act II, scene 3, an anguished dialogue between Sieglinde and Siegmund, serves as a compressed, or better put, a “dissolving” recapitulation of their love duet from Act I. The flanking scenes (sc. 2, largely given over to Wotan's great monologue; and sc. 4, Brünnhilde's Annunciation of Death), on the other hand, prefigure the rapturous close of Act III, which is not so much a recapitulation of material from Act II, scenes 2 and 4, as it is a culminating fulfillment. We might now begin to understand Wagner's claim, in a letter of 3 October 1855 to Liszt, relative to Wotan's Act II narrative: “It is the most important scene in the whole progression of the great, four-part drama.”¹⁵ For not only does it recapitulate some of the most significant musical events from Rheingold (motives derived from the Valhalla theme, and the syncopated figures first heard in Alberich's monologue from Rheingold, sc. 4); more importantly, it points ahead, largely through its elaboration of the turning figure usually called Wotan's Sorrow, to the concluding scene of the drama. And it is Walküre, Act II, scene 3, more than any other scene, that is so fantastically recreated in the following dramas, especially in the tremendous finales of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. The whole tetralogy does, in essence, turn on the relationship between Walküre, Act II, scene 2 (a “lament sung by an invisible rhapsodist”)¹⁶ and Act III, scene 3. For when Wotan solemnly marches through the Magic Fire at the end of Walküre, the real action of the cycle is fundamentally over; much of what follows is reflection, composed-out “criticism” of the first two music dramas. Is it an accident, then, that the first of the Ring motives to reach their final form (the Valkyries' motive, and the so-called Fate motive)¹⁷ eventually found their way into Walküre, the musical center of the whole?

It is in Siegfried that Wagner perfects that technique which, in Thomas Mann's variation of an obviously Schlegelian thought, is employed to “preserve the inward unity and abiding presentness of the whole at each moment.”¹⁸ This is the method which informs the musical proceedings in the epic dialogues involving the Wanderer, and is perhaps best exemplified by the exchange between the Wanderer and Mime in Act I, scene 2. Their “question and answer game” provides a condensed summary of the high points of the action up to that point; and moreover, the musical events are presented in the proper order. (A similar system of recurrences is at the heart of the Wanderer/Siegfried exchange in Act III, sc. 2.) The Wanderer's answers to Mime's questions call forth references drawn largely from Rheingold, while Mime's first two answers to the Wanderer's questions recall music from Acts I and III of Walküre, and his frenzied response to the third question recalls Siegfried's Lied, “Da hast du die Stücken,” from Siegfried, Act I, scene 1. But Wagner's epic dialogues have a threefold reference; not only do they point backward, they maintain the present and prophecy the future. The most important premonition of the future in the Wanderer/Mime scene occurs during the Wanderer's third answer, at Wagner's setting of “Mit seiner Spitze sperrt Wotan die Welt …” to an underlying dotted motive in the orchestra. This material will recur at later points, and thus forges a link with the most significant centers of attraction in Götterdämmerung: the Norns' scene (at, e.g., the Second Norn's “Schnitt Wotan in des Speeren Schaft”), Waltraute's narrative (at “Des Stammes Scheite …”), and Brünnhilde's Immolation scene (at “Starke Scheite …”). Wagner's projection of the present is nicely demonstrated in the Wanderer/Erda dialogue in Act III, scene 1. The Wanderer's command to Erda, “Wache, Wala” may be viewed as a basically new motive that creates a frame of presentness for the epic duologue. And lastly, this interpenetration of past, present, and future often leads to a transformation of the time dimension itself. The transition to the closing scene of Act III, for instance, marks the culmination of many references to the Magic Fire music that have occurred throughout Siegfried, the most important being Mime's Vision from Act I, scene 3. Thus, when Siegfried makes his way through the Magic Fire—to music that we know from Walküre—the past is magically transformed into the present.

Similar processes are all-pervasive in Götterdämmerung, which Wagner aptly referred to as a “recapitulation of the whole, a prelude and three pieces.”¹⁹ But precisely how is this recapitulation achieved? I would suggest that the last of the Ring dramas manages to summarize all that has gone before by means of its organization as a series of widening and contracting recapitulatory centers. At the largest level, each act contains a center of attraction that specifically recalls one of the previous dramas. In Act I, it is Waltraute's narrative (sc. 3) that reworks the principal material of Walküre (Act II, sc. 2 & 4, and Act III, sc. 3). The “ghostly, dreamlike duologue”²⁰ for Alberich and Hagen that opens Act II, in addition to refashioning the musical substance of Hagen's Watch (Act I, sc. 2), also recasts the sinister utterances of Alberich's monologue in Rheingold, scene 4. But most impressive is Siegfried's narrative just preceding his death in Act III, scene 2, where Wagner presents, in highly condensed form, a summary of the whole of Siegfried. The first part of the narrative (from “Mime, hiess ein mürrischer Zwerg”) brings references from Act I: the Vorspiel, Mime's Staarenlied, Siegfried's Forging Song, and Mime's Vision; the second part (“Auf den Aesten sass es”) recalls all three strophes of the Woodbird's Song from Act II; while the third part (“Rasch ohne Zögern”) calls up events from the Act III finale: Siegfried's passage through the Magic Fire, his awakening of Brünnhilde, and immediately following his fatal wounding, the luminous music of Brünnhilde's Awakening.²¹

The next level involves principally the Vorspiel and Act III, both of which contain a series of focal points that mirror the whole drama. In the Vorspiel (“une Overture tout extraordinaire,” as Wagner called it),²² it is the Norns' scene and the orchestral depiction of Siegfried's Rhine Journey which, between them, hearken to a number of the main centers of attraction in the previous dramas—the Rheingold Vorspiel,²³ Erda's monologue from scene 4, the Annunciation of Death (Walküre, Act II, sc. 4), the Wanderer/Mime dialogue (Siegfried, Act I, sc. 2), the Siegfried/Brünnhilde love duet (Siegfried, Act III, sc. 3), and the Rhinemaidens' “Rheingold” song—while the intervening duet for Siegfried and Brünnhilde preserves the presentness of Wagner's massive Overture. A similar procedure may be noted in the first two scenes of Act III: while scene 1 links up with the Rhinemaidens' music in Rheingold, and Siegfried's scene 2 narrative, as we have seen, summarizes Siegfried, the ensuing Funeral Music might be viewed as a compressed recapitulation of the Wälsung music from Walküre, with climax and dissolution based on the Siegfried/Brünnhilde duet from the Götterdämmerung Vorspiel.

That Acts I and II should not participate much in this level is only appropriate, for by centering on the events leading up to Siegfried's death, they maintain the presentness of this largely recapitulatory drama. What we find instead are extremely condensed “mini-recapitulations” of the three preceding dramas, as in Act I, scene 1 when Hagen tells Gunther and Gutrune of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, Siegmund and Sieglinde, and the ring, or in Act II, scene 1 when Alberich informs Hagen of much that he certainly already knows: Siegfried's slaying of Fafner, his love for Brünnhilde, and the Rhinemaidens' hope that the Ring be returned to them.

On the last level, a single scene, Brünnhilde's “visionary” Immolation,²⁴ is constructed as a summary of the whole tetralogy. Although this great finale is largely a recreation of the closing scene of Walküre (especially from the point where Brünnhilde places the ring on her finger and grasps a fire brand), it contains extended references to the other dramas as well: the Love music from Siegfried Act III, scene 3 (“Wie Sonne lauter …”), and the Rhinemaidens' music from Rheingold (“Der Wassertiefe weise Schwestern …” and likewise in the symphonic close). The main references to material from Götterdämmerung appear in those extended stretches of music based on Waltraute's narrative (cf. Brünnhilde's “Ruhe, ruhe du Gott” and Waltraute's “Erlös't wär Gott und Welt”). The main pillars of the scene—the dotted orchestral motive at the beginning, at the midpoint (just after “Ruhe, du Gott”), and the apocalyptic statement of the Valhalla theme at the end (with the dotted motive running underneath)—are also drawn directly from Waltraute's narrative. The dotted motive (which we have already traced back to Siegfried, Act I, sc. 2) had supported Waltraute's “Des Stammes Scheite …,” while the sequentially treated Valhalla theme (together with the dotted motive) supported the immediately ensuing text-lines, “Der Götter Rath.” The Immolation scene might thus be interpreted as an expanded treatment, a peroration of material latent in Waltraute's narrative.

III

It is probably not a coincidence that in the years just prior to his work on the music for The Ring, Wagner should have been preoccupied with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the Bildungsroman that served as a model for the monumental creations of so many nineteenth-century German artists. As Wagner observed in Opera and Drama (1850/51), Wilhelm Meister attempts to portray man “struggling for an artistically beautiful form.”²⁵ And a number of years later, while thinking back on his activities of 1848-51, Wagner noted that in musing on the possibilities for an ideal society, he was “meditating nothing so intensely new, but merely pursuing problems akin to those which so dearly had busied our great poets themselves, as we may see in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre.”²⁶ But more important than Wagner's utopian politics is the musical world that he was about to summon up, the world of The Ring, which he goes on to discuss in the essay from which I have just quoted. Thus, The Ring and Wilhelm Meister are related, and not only because both are vast representations of the world. More importantly, both are animated by the same constructive techniques.

Friedrich Schlegel described these techniques with prophetic vision in his review of Goethe's Meister, a work in which “the innate impulse of the whole expresses itself in both the larger and smaller sections,” and which aspires to a kind of organic state by means of a complex web of “inner connections and relations,” often arranged such that “every book contains the germ cell of the next.”²⁷ (Isn't this Wagner's technique, too? We need only think of Donner's summoning of the mists at the end of Rheingold, and the reappearance of the same material in the opening storm music of Walküre.) Schlegel further commented on the precise means by which these processes are actuated: the second book, for instance, begins with a “musical recapitulation” of the whole of the first; the appearance of Jarno and the Amazon in the fourth book corresponds to the earlier appearance of the Stranger and Mignon; while the last book is “really the Work itself,” an artful reworking of all that has gone before.²⁸ At the very center of Goethe's novel (bks. 3, 4 & 5) are the discussions of Hamlet—that Bildungsroman gone wrong—whose essence is so close to that of Meister that “the two might be confused for one another.” Here Goethe reaches the heights of what Schlegel calls “poetic criticism” in that he “represents the representation anew, and fashions again that which has already been formed.”²⁹ Goethe was to extend the procedure in the sequel to the Lehrjahre, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. When he wrote to Schiller about his plans for the second novel, he noted that “there must remain interlockings which, like the plan itself, point to a further continuation”; in addition, it is possible to view the reappearance and transformation of motifs from the first novel in the second (like the relationship of art and life, or art and craft) as what Goethe called “repeated mirrorings.”³⁰ And how better to describe The Ring than as a continual act of musical self-criticism, or of repeated musical mirrorings?

Goethe and Wagner evolved such similar structuring methods, and were concerned with the whole problem of structure itself because both of them faced the same problem, even if Goethe approached it with more ironic detachment than did Wagner. I am referring to the central problem of the nineteenth-century artist, the resolution of the tension between the imaginatively unique (what Schlegel called the “interesting”), and the mythically universal. Both Goethe and Wagner felt the lack of a system of universally acknowledged and interrelated symbols capable of infinite metamorphosis. As Schlegel maintained in the “Gespräch über die Poesie,” the ancients had such a ready-made, unconsciously formed system in their mythology. The modern artist must fashion consciously that which for the Greek tragedians was a natural product, but at the same time he must preserve the illusion of unconscious creation.³¹ Thus the artist has to think up his own world of recurrent images, thereby creating a “new mythology” in each individual artwork.³²

Perhaps none of the Romantics grappled with the dilemma as did Wagner, who felt more acutely than any other the loss of the god of the symphony: Beethoven. Thus, while composing the music for Rheingold, he wrote to Liszt of the “agonizingly difficult task of forming a non-existent world;”³³ and this task he accomplished by fashioning a cosmos of highly unconventional conventions, by raising the most individual musical gestures and gestural complexes to the level of universality through large-scale and varied recurrence. It is in this way, more than through the presence of Wotan or Fricka, that each of the elements of Wagner's musical world is mythologized. We might begin with the most conventional item that tonal music has to offer, the cadence. Wagner invented a host of absolutely individual cadential formations—Loge's “Für Weibes Wonne und Werth” (Rheingold, sc. 2), the Fate motive associated with Brünnhilde's Annunciation of Death (Walküre, Act II, sc. 4), Mime's “Des Viblungen Neid” (Siegfried, Act I, sc. 1, actually a variant of Loge's cadence and the Renunciation of Love theme), Brünnhilde's ecstatic “Dass dir zu wenig mein Werth gewann” (Götterdämmerung, Vorspiel)—all of which are mythologized through multifold repetition at various points in the cycle. Harmony and tonality are elevated in the same manner. We need only think of the numerous harmonic variants of the Rhinemaidens' “Rheingold” cry, or of the fact that so many of the principal motives and melodies (Siegfried's horncall, the Valkyries' theme, the Valhalla and Sword motives) tend to recur at fixed tonal levels. Even rhythm is made into a mythically recurrent element; the rhythm of Alberich's syncopated triplet figure (at “Bin ich nun frei,” Rheingold, sc. 4), divorced from its harmonies, acts as a demonic ostinato in Götterdämmerung, Act II, scenes 1, 4, and 5. But it is mainly form that is put in touch with mythology. Indeed there is more than a little irony in the fact that underlying much of Wagner's supposedly seamless continuity is the strophic design of the Lied, and not only in the first two acts of the fairy-tale opera, Siegfried, where the Lied forms are meant to be more or less recognizable. More subtle are the disguised strophic patterns in Wotan's Monologue (Walküre Act II, sc. 2), and in the Norns' scene and Siegfried's narrative from Götterdämmerung. But at the largest level, the total form is mythologized by means of the highly elaborate recapitulatory patterns that have already been considered.

In closing we might turn to a twentieth-century artist who likewise faced a mythological crisis, a writer whose cultural universe was circumscribed by Goethe and Wagner, that is, Thomas Mann. For the author of The Magic Mountain, as for his artistic forbears, the mythic recurrence provided a central structuring principle. No wonder, then, that he was so intensely drawn to the scenes of epic narration in The Ring,³⁴ scenes for which Mann created literary equivalents in The Tales of Jacob, the first of the novels in his Joseph tetralogy, where Joseph and his father tell one another stories that are well known to both in a kind of “spoken antiphony,” and where all is “recollection, confirmation, and edification.”³⁵ Mann's technique is fundamentally the same as Wagner's, and how well this is demonstrated in the Joseph novels, works conceived as a massive set of variations of the same cyclic pattern: redemptive sacrifice, descent into the abyss, ultimate elevation. Here too we find interrelated centers of attraction that point forward or backward, that embody condensed summaries of the whole, such as the Prelude to The Tales of Jacob, “The Descent into Hell,” and the corresponding section of Joseph the Provider, “The Prelude in the Upper Circles,” both of them extended statements of Mann's ironic theology. Parallels of this sort abound; thus, the “finales” of Young Joseph and Joseph in Egypt both involve a descent, the first into a real pit, the second into prison. Underlying the Joseph novels is the same theme that we have isolated in The Ring and Wilhelm Meister, the tension between the universal and the particular, the mythic and the uniquely interesting.³⁶ As Joseph himself puts it, “… what constitutes civilized life is that the binding and traditional depth shall fulfill itself in the freedom of God which is the I; there is no human civilization without the one and without the other.”³⁷

But which has priority, Wagnerian music drama or Goethean Bildungsroman? Is Mann's a musical or a literary technique? Although Schlegel found the large-scale repetition to be quintessentially musical, the repeated but varied topos is a ploy traceable to the very beginnings of literature.³⁸ It is perhaps a query like the one over which Mann's Pharaoh puzzled—the relationship between the temporal and the eternal—that is, “one of those beautiful questions which permit of no solution, so that there is no end to the contemplation of them from dewy eve to early dawn.”³⁹

Notes

1. Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe [hereafter KFSA], vol. II, Charakteristiken und Kritiken, hrsg. Hans Eichner (München, Paderborn, Wien: Schöningh, 1967), p. 182.

2. John Daverio, “‘Total Work of Art’ or ‘Nameless Deeds of Music’: Some Thoughts on German Romantic Opera,” Opera Quarterly 4 (Winter 1986-87): 67-68.

3. KFSA II, pp. 182-183.

4. Donald Francis Tovey, “A Note on Opera,” in The Main Stream of Music and Other Essays (New York: Oxford UP, 1949), p. 359.

5. Richard Wagner, “On the Application of Music to the Drama” (1879), in Prose Works [hereafter PW], vol. VI, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Routledge & Kegen Paul, 1897), pp. 176, 187.

6. Ibid., p. 179.

7. See Warren Drake, “The Norns' Scene in Götterdämmerung: a Cycle within a Cycle,” Miscellanea Musicologica XIV (1985): 57-78; William Kinderman, “Dramatic Recapitulation in Wagner's Götterdämmerung,” 19th Century Music IV (1980): 101-112 (Kinderman only considers Siegfried's narrative in Act II, sc. 2—see my commentary on his account in note 21, below); and Arnold Whittall, “Wagner's Great Transition? From Lohengrin to Das Rheingold,” Music Analysis II (1983): 278-279.

8. KFSA II, p. 135.

9. KFSA II, p. 96.

10. Quoted in Curt von Westernhagen, The Forging of the “Ring”: Richard Wagner's Compositional Sketches for Der Ring des Nibelungen, trans. Arnold and Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976), p. 9.

11. See in particular Robert Bailey, “Wagner's Musical Sketches for ‘Siegfrieds Tod,’” Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. Harold Powers (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968), p. 484.

12. Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, Bd. I (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1900), p. 217.

13. Rudolf Stephan, “Gibt es ein Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner?” in Das Drama Richard Wagners als musikalische Kunstwerk, hrsg. Carl Dahlhaus (Regensburg: Bosse, 1970), pp. 13-14.

14. Westernhagen has shown, however, that the Erda music was probably conceived first, and only later incorporated into the Vorspiel; Forging of the “Ring,” pp. 11, 57.

15. Briefwechsel II, p. 99-100.

16. Heinrich Porges, Wagner Rehearsing the “Ring,” trans. Robert L. Jacobs (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), p. 57.

17. Bailey, “Sketches,” pp. 464-467.

18. Thomas Mann, “The Making of The Magic Mountain,” in The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 720.

19. Cosima Wagner's Diaries, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), p. 921.

20. Westernhagen, p. 200.

21. Kinderman, in “Dramatic Recapitulation,” misses the relationship between the narrative and Act I of Siegfried. He considers the recapitulatory portion of the narrative only from the recall of the Waldweben music, probably because he is concerned with showing the extent to which the narrative restates the E/C tonal framework of Siegfried Act II, sc. 3 and Act III, sc. 3. But it was Wagner's intent to recall the tonal and thematic framework of the entire drama. Thus the first part of the narrative hinges on G minor and D minor, two of the main tonalities of Siegfried, Act I. The G-minor music even reaches back farther, to Mime's “Sorglose Schmiede,” from Rheingold, sc. 3.

22. Westernhagen, p. 181.

23. Wagner pointed out that the Norns' scene acted as a counterpart to the Rhinemaidens' music in Rheingold, sc. 1, only in Götterdämmerung it is the “dark side of nature” that he meant to portray. See Porges, p. 117.

24. Porges, p. 144.

25. Wagner, PW II, p. 176.

26. Wagner, “On State and Religion” (1864), PW II, p. 8.

27. KFSA II, pp. 131, 134, 135.

28. Ibid. II, pp. 129, 135, 146.

29. Ibid. II, p. 139-140.

30. Eric Blackall, Goethe and the Novel (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1976), pp. 224, 261-262.

31. According to Porges, p. 7, Wagner is supposed to have said of the huge crescendo of sound in the Rheingold Vorspiel: it “should throughout create the impression of a phenomenon of nature developing quite of its own accord … there must be no sense of a conscious purpose imposing itself.”

32. KFSA II, pp. 312-313, 318.

33. Briefwechsel, p. 64; letter of 15 January 1854.

34. Thomas Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985), p. 25: “An undercurrent of epic is present in all his creations, and what I have always loved most … are his great narrative passages, including the scene with the Norns in Götterdämmerung and the incomparably epic game of question and answer that is played out between Mime and the Wanderer” (from “Versuch über das Theater,” 1908).

35. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1956), p. 73.

36. On this point, see Erich Heller, Thomas Mann: The Ironic German (South Bend, Indiana: Regnery, Gateway, 1958), pp. 218-222.

37. Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, p. 937.

38. See KFSA II, p. 129 (“Über Goethes Meister”), p. 208 (Athenäum Fragment 253), p. 220 (Athenäum Fragment 322).

39. Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, p. 948.