Der Ring Des Nibelungen: Composition of The Poem - Conception of The Ring

Conception of The Ring

According to the composer's own account – as related in his autobiography Mein Leben – it was after the February Revolution that he began to sketch a play on the life of the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. While researching this work, he came to see Friedrich as "a historical rebirth of the old, pagan Siegfried". Then, in the summer of 1848, he wrote the essay Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Saga (The Wibelungs: World History as Told in Saga), in which he noted some historical links (spurious, as it happens) between the Hohenstaufens and the legendary Nibelungs. This led him to consider Siegfried as a possible subject for a new opera, and by October 1848 the entire Ring cycle had been conceived.

This rather straightforward account of the Ring's origins, however, has been disputed by a number of authorities, who accuse Wagner of deliberately distorting the facts so as to bring them into harmony with his own private version of history. The actual sequence of events, it seems, was not nearly as clear-cut as he would have us believe. It was in October 1846 – some sixteen months before the February Revolution – that he first drew up a plan for a five-act drama based on the life of Friedrich Barbarossa. He may even have considered writing an opera on Siegfried as early as 1843, when he read Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology), or possibly in 1844, when he borrowed several works on the Nibelungs from the Royal Library in Dresden. As for Die Wibelungen, it would appear that he only started work on this essay in December 1848 at the earliest, finishing it sometime before 22 February 1849, when he read it to his friend Eduard Devrient.

Whatever the truth, Wagner was certainly contemplating an opera on Siegfried by 1 April 1848, when he informed Devrient of his plans.

Wagner was probably encouraged in these endeavours by a number of German intellectuals who believed that contemporary artists should seek inspiration in the pages of the Nibelungenlied, a 12th century epic poem in Middle High German which, since its rediscovery in 1755, had been hailed by the German Romantics as their country's "national epic". In 1844 the philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer suggested that the Nibelungenlied would make a suitable subject for German opera; and in 1845 and 1846 Louise Otto-Peters and Franz Brendel penned a series of articles in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik inviting composers to write a "national opera" based on the epic. Otto-Peters even wrote a libretto for such an opera.

Wagner, as it happened, was already familiar with the Nibelungenlied. He had even drawn upon it for one of the scenes in an earlier opera, Lohengrin, the text of which was written between July and November 1845. Act II, Scene 4, in which Ortrud interrupts the procession to the minster and confronts Elsa, is based on Chapter 14 of the Nibelungenlied, "How the Queens Railed at Each Other"; in the corresponding scene of Götterdämmerung (also Act II, Scene 4), it is Brünnhilde who interrupts a stately procession and provokes a quarrel.