Der Ring Des Nibelungen: Composition of The Poem - Siegfried's Tod

Siegfried's Tod

As part of his preparations for the projected opera on Siegfried, Wagner first drafted a preliminary study of the relevant German and Nordic myths, Die Nibelungensage (Mythus) (The Nibelung Saga (Myth)). This lengthy prose scenario, which was completed by 4 October 1848, contains an outline of the entire Ring cycle from start to finish, though there is no evidence that Wagner was contemplating anything more at this point than a single opera on the death of Siegfried. When he made a fair copy of this text on 8 October, he renamed it Die Sage von den Nibelungen (The Saga of the Nibelungs). In the collected edition of his works (Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen) it is entitled Der Nibelungen-Mythus: als Entwurf zu einem Drama (The Nibelung Myth: as Sketch for a Drama).

In drafting this prose scenario, Wagner drew upon numerous works of German and Scandinavian mythology, both primary texts (usually in contemporary German translations, though Wagner had some knowledge of Old Norse and Middle German) and commentaries on them. The most important of the former were the Völsunga Saga, the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Nibelungenlied and Thidriks saga af Bern, while the most important of the latter were Jacob Grimm's German Mythology and Wilhelm Grimm's The German Hero-Saga. In addition to these, however, Wagner picked up various details from at least twenty-two other sources, including a number of key philosophical texts that informed the symbolism of the Ring. Wagner contradicts his sources on various points – necessarily so as the sources don’t always agree with one another – conflates disparate stories into continuous narratives, creates some new, memorable characters by combining minor characters from different sources, etc. The final scenario is as much a unique recreation of the original myths as the Nibelungenlied was in its day.

Because Die Sage von den Nibelungen already contained a detailed account of the dramatic action of the proposed opera, Wagner neglected to make any prose sketches according to his usual practice. Instead, he immediately wrote a prose draft of the new work, which was to be called Siegfried's Tod (Siegfried's Death), complete with "English" apostrophe! This apostrophe, incidentally, appears in all the textual manuscripts of the work and in the private imprint of 1853, but was dropped from the title in the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen of 1871–1873.

On 28 October 1848, Wagner read the prose draft of Siegfried's Tod to Eduard Devrient, and following some critical comments by the latter on the obscurity of the subject, he drafted a two-scene prologue which filled in some of the background story. This new prose draft was cast almost entirely in dialogue, much of it already very close to the final verse form it would take. By 12 November the revised draft of Siegfried's Tod was completed, and by 28 November it had been turned into alliterative verse, becoming in the process a fully fledged libretto for a three-act opera with a two-scene prologue. The following month (presumably) Wagner prepared the first fair copy (Zweitschrift des Textbuches), but almost immediately the work was extensively revised and a second fair copy (Drittschrift des Textbuches) was drawn up to reflect these revisions. It was at this stage that the episode known as "Hagen's Watch" (the final section of Act I Scene 2) made its first appearance.

With its two-scene prologue and three-act structure, Siegfried's Tod was to all intents and purposes a draft text for what would eventually be the final part of the tetralogy, Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods).

At this point, however, Wagner, it seems, began to doubt the wisdom of writing an opera on such an obscure subject. Even in Germany the Nibelungenlied was not very well known, and several of the other sources that he consulted were even more recondite. Whatever the reason, the fact of the matter is that having completed the libretto of Siegfried's Tod, Wagner then put the work aside and turned his attention to other matters. Between December 1848 and March 1850, he wrote several influential essays, some of them quite lengthy. He also spent much of this time working out detailed scenarios for several other operas on a variety of historical and mythical figures: Jesus Christ, Achilles, Friedrich Barbarossa and Wieland der Schmied. None of these operas ever saw the light of day, though one musical sketch survives for Jesus von Nazareth.