Trilogy
The earliest mention we have of a festival theatre being specially constructed for a performance of Siegfried's Tod is in a letter to the artist Ernst Benedikt Kietz, dated 14 September 1850. A week later in a letter to his friend Theodor Uhlig, dated 22 September, Wagner elaborated on this idea: now he was hoping to stage three performances of Siegfried's Tod in a specially constructed festival theatre, after which both the theatre and the score were to be destroyed: "If everything is arranged satisfactorily, I will allow three performances of Siegfried to be given in one week under these circumstances: after the third performance the theatre is to be torn down and my score burned...."
Gradually the notion of a trilogy of operas culminating with Siegfried's Tod was beginning to form in Wagner's mind. The idea was not a new one. In 1847 he had read and been deeply impressed by Aeschylus's Greek trilogy the Oresteia in a German translation by Johann Gustav Droysen; and in 1849, after his flight from Dresden, he had read Droysen's reconstruction of the same playwright's trilogy the Prometheia, which includes the well-known tragedy Prometheus Bound. It seemed only right that a similar trilogy of German tragedies, written by a latter-day Aeschylus, should be performed in its own dedicated theatre and as part of a "specially-appointed festival".
The idea of expanding Siegfried's Tod into a series of two or more operas would have been particularly appealing to Wagner, as he had now come to realize that it would be impossible to say all that he wanted to in a single opera without an inordinate number of digressions. The political events of the past few years and his recent discovery of the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach had greatly enlarged the scope of ideas which he hoped to explore in his new opera. He also wished to incorporate various ideas that he had been mulling over in the works on Jesus, Frederick, Achilles and Wieland (all four of which had been effectively abandoned by now). These ideas ranged over the politics of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin and the philosophy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians.
In the winter of 1850–1851, while he was working on Opera and Drama, Wagner toyed with the idea of writing a comic opera based on a well-known folk-tale, Vor einem, der auszug, das Fürchten zu lernen (The Boy Who Set Out to Learn Fear), which he had come across in Grimms' Fairy Tales. "Imagine my surprise," he later wrote to his friend the violinist Theodor Uhlig, "when I suddenly realized that this youth was none other than young Siegfried!"
Within a week, in May 1851, he had drawn up some fragmentary prose sketches for a prequel, or "comic counterpart", to Siegfried's Tod, which he called Jung-Siegfried (Young Siegfried), later altering the title to Der junge Siegfried (The Young Siegfried). A more extensive prose draft was completed by 1 June, and by 24 June this had been transformed into a verse draft. By August the fair copy of this verse libretto was finished and Wagner had even begun to set it to music. These efforts, however, never amounted to anything more than a handful of sketches, which were later used in the composition of Siegfried.
The earliest mention we have of a festival of three operas based on the Nibelungenlied is in the autobiographical work Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde (A Communication to My Friends), which Wagner originally wrote in August 1851: "I propose to produce my myth in three complete dramas...."
Der junge Siegfried and Siegfried's Tod were now clearly envisaged as the second and third dramas of a trilogy. By October, however, Wagner had decided that this trilogy required a prelude – was he thinking again of Aeschylus and the ancient Greeks, whose trilogies were usually accompanied by a satyr play? – and the text of Eine Mittheilung was duly altered to reflect the change. To the sentence quoted above he added the words, "which will be preceded by a great prelude". Nevertheless, Wagner always referred to the Ring as a trilogy rather than a tetralogy. He envisaged it being performed as part of a three-day festival preceded by a preliminary evening. Thanks to Aeschylus and his contemporaries, the term trilogy had a certain cachet for Wagner which the term tetralogy never acquired.
In October 1851 Wagner drafted a short prose sketch for the preliminary opera which would precede the trilogy proper. He vacillated over the title of the work, trying out in turn, Der Raub: Vorspiel (The Theft: Prelude), Der Raub des Rheingoldes (The Theft of the Rhinegold) and Das Rheingold (Vorspiel) (The Rhinegold (Prelude)). The following month he drafted some prose sketches for the first of the three main dramas, Siegmund und Sieglinde: der Walküre Bestrafung (Siegmund and Sieglinde: the Valkyrie's Punishment). Between March and November 1852 he elaborated these short sketches after his usual practice, developing prose drafts from them, which he then proceeded to turn into verse drafts. By that time he had renamed the operas Das Rheingold and Die Walküre respectively.
It is interesting to note that whereas the prose draft of Das Rheingold was written before that of Die Walküre, the verse draft of Die Walküre preceded that of Das Rheingold. So while there is some truth to the oft-quoted remark that the Ring cycle was conceived backwards, it is not completely accurate.
The original prose sketch for Das Rheingold consisted of just three paragraphs, each prefaced by a Roman numeral. It would appear from this that Wagner originally conceived it as a three-act opera in its own right, and this is confirmed by a letter he wrote in October 1851 to his friend Theodor Uhlig: "Great plans for Siegfried: three dramas, with a three-act prelude.". By 1852, however, Das Rheingold had become a one-act opera in four scenes. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for regarding the opening scene of the opera as a prologue ("The Theft of the Gold") to the main part of the drama ("Valhalla"). Thus, both Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung share the same prologue-plus-trilogy structure which characterises the Ring cycle as a whole.
As for Die Walküre, the first act of this opera probably gave Wagner more trouble than any other act in the entire tetralogy. In his two prose sketches for it Wotan enters Hunding's house in his guise as Der Wanderer ("The Wanderer") and thrusts the sword into the ash tree, which Siegmund then withdraws only minutes later; the fully worked-out prose draft also brings Wotan onto the stage. It was only at a later stage in the evolution of the text that Wagner banished the Wanderer and his sword to the backstory which Sieglinde narrates to Siegmund. Now the sword is already embedded in the tree as the curtain goes up on Act 1 and Siegmund's withdrawal of it becomes a climactic piece of dramaturgy.
Read more about this topic: Der Ring Des Nibelungen: Composition Of The Poem