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

Wagner The Writer

Wagner's libretti, which he invariably wrote himself, usually passed through four stages; with one or two minor qualifications, the libretti of the four Ring operas were no different. These stages are as follows:

• Prose Sketch (Prosaskizze) – a brief outline of the dramatic action. Typically these sketches consisted of no more than a few paragraphs of prose, though Wagner sometimes added to them or modified them before proceeding to the next stage. This was the case with the sketches for the first three parts of the tetralogy. Exceptionally, however, Wagner (for reasons which will be explained later) never drafted a prose sketch for Götterdämmerung (or Siegfried's Tod, as it was originally called). The prose sketch for Act III of Die Walküre has disappeared.
• Prose Draft (Prosaentwurf) – an elaborate prose treatment of the opera, describing the action in great detail. These drafts were usually ten or more pages in length. They included a considerable amount of dialogue. Prose drafts survive for all four Ring operas.
• Verse Draft (Erstschrift des Textbuches) – a first draft of the final libretto, written in an archaic form of German alliterative verse known as Stabreim. Wagner created his verse drafts by versifying the dialogue already contained in his prose drafts – turning prose into poetry – or by creating new verse to replace those sections of the prose drafts for which he had not yet sketched any dialogue. He also added new elements not present in the prose drafts. For instance, the symbolic use of Wotan's spear and its engraved runes to embody the rule of law is not present in the prose draft of Das Rheingold: this idea only came to Wagner while he was working on the verse draft of Die Walküre. It was also while developing the latter that he first thought of making Loge a god of fire: in the prose draft of Das Rheingold he is merely a trickster and teller of unwelcome truths. While writing his verse drafts, Wagner also greatly expanded his stage directions (which, of course, were always in prose).
• Fair Copy (Reinschrift des Textbuches) – a clean, carefully written verse libretto (or Dichtung, "poem", as Wagner liked to call his finished libretti), usually free of corrections and alterations. Punctuation and capitalization were regularized at this stage. The fair copies generally incorporated the final version of any passage of the corresponding verse draft for which Wagner has sketched two or more competing versions; in a few cases the fair copy has an entirely new variant. The fair copies, however, were not necessarily the final versions of the libretti, as Wagner frequently made slight – but sometimes telling – alterations to the text during the composition of the music. Furthermore, he sometimes made two, three, or even four fair copies, incorporating revisions as he did so, in which case the fair copies are called respectively Zweitschrift (des Textbuches), Drittschrift, Viertschrift, and Fünftschrift.