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

It was in 1852 that Wagner finally settled upon the name Der Ring des Nibelungen for the complete cycle. Other titles that were considered and rejected included: Das Gold des Nibelungen (The Gold of the Nibelung), which appeared on the title page of the verse draft of Die Walküre; and Der Reif des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), which was mentioned in a letter to August Röckel, dated 12 September 1852. On 14 October 1852, however, Wagner informed Theodor Uhlig that he had finally decided that the title of the entire cycle would be Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung, or The Nibelung's Ring).

In November and December 1852, Wagner made extensive revisions to the libretti of Der junge Siegfried and Siegfried's Tod. This was partly to accommodate the expansion of the cycle and the growing significance of Wotan, the protagonist of the first two parts of the tetralogy, and partly to reflect Wagner's reading of the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (see below). The changes to Der junge Siegfried were entered into the first fair copy (Reinschrift des Textbuches), while those to Siegfried's Tod were entered into the third fair copy (Viertschrift des Textbuches). In each case several pages of the fair copy were replaced with newly written ones. The principal changes to Siegfried's Tod involved the opening scene of the prologue (the Norns scene), Brünnhilde's scene with Waltraute (which had originally included all nine Valkyries), and Brünnhilde's closing speech at the end of the opera.

Fair copies of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre and a fourth fair copy of Siegfried's Tod (Fünftschrift des Textbuches) were completed by 15 December 1852 and the entire text was privately published in February 1853. Fifty copies were printed, most of which were given to Wagner’ friends. Over the course of four evenings (16–19 February 1853) Wagner gave a public reading of the complete text in Zürich's Hôtel Baur au Lac. This text, however, did not represent the final version, as Wagner often made changes to his libretti while he was setting them to music. In the case of the Ring such changes were duly entered into Wagner's personal copy of the 1853 printing; but not all of these emendations were incorporated in either the public printing of 1863 or the version in the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen of 1872, a situation which has caused unending problems for scholars, translators and performers alike.

Furthermore, it was probably not until 1856 that Wagner definitively changed the titles of the third and fourth parts of the Ring to Siegfried and Götterdämmerung respectively. In 1863 the texts of all four Ring operas were published for the first time under their present titles.