Der Ring Des Nibelungen: Composition of The Poem - Opera and Drama

Opera and Drama

Parallel to these renewed efforts on The Ring was Wagner's work on a lengthy essay entitled Oper und Drama ("Opera and Drama"), which musicologist Deryck Cooke (1979) has described as, "essentially a blueprint ". Wagner's principal theoretical work, Oper und Drama grew out of a draft of an essay on Das Wesen der Oper ("The Essence of Opera"), which, preparatory to the composition of Siegfried's Tod, he wrote in an attempt "to tidy up a whole life that now lay behind me, to articulate each half-formed intuition on a conscious level....". First mentioned in a letter to Theodor Uhlig on 20 September 1850, the work was begun by 9 October. Wagner, it seems, anticipated that it would be no longer than the other essays he had recently completed; but over the winter of 1850–1851, it grew into a book of some considerable size. Completed by 20 January 1851, just four months after Wagner conceived it, it was first published in 1852 by J. J. Weber of Leipzig. It was in the pages of Opera and Drama that Wagner's nebulous or half-conscious ideas on artistic method and the relationship between music and drama were first given concrete expression.

In order to acquire a fuller appreciation of The Ring, and of the ideas which inform it, it is necessary to place the work in the context of Wagner's wider literary and political endeavours. Four prose works, including Oper und Drama, are essential reading for the serious student of the Ring. It is largely on these works, the so-called "Zürich Manifestos", that Wagner's reputation as a controversial writer rests:

• Die Kunst und die Revolution (Art and Revolution, July 1849)
• Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Art-Work of the Future, November 1849)
• Kunst und Klima (Art and Climate, March 1850)
• Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama, January 1851)