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The Structure of the "Ring" and Its Evolution by Robert Bailey

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The Structure of the The Structure of the "Ring" and Its Evolution Author(s): Robert Bailey Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jul., 1977), pp. 48-61 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/746769 Accessed: 07-11-2017 23:11 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music This content downloaded from 70.103.220.4 on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 23:11:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Structure of the Ring and its Evolution ROBERT BAILEY Although we possess more preliminary were mate- made in the act of turning into verse the rial for the music of Wagner's works than dramatic for conception which he had written out those of any of the other great composers, in detailthe in a complete Prose Scenario. Thus the vast bulk of it takes the form of complete musical drafts structure of so vast a work as the Ring is for the operas-often two drafts for each to someone. extent the story of the evolution of its These do not answer the intriguing question four of poems. what Wagner had in mind when he finally sat It is well known that Wagner conceived down, after much preliminary thought, to those begin four poems in reverse order, that he began the actual composition of one of his operas. with In the last poem and gradually worked back- preparing his first complete draft of the wardmusic, toward the beginning. His first opera when his immediate concern was to set his based text, on Nibelung material was Siegfrieds Tod, what was he using as a basis for the underlying later on to be known in its revised version as musical structure? Gotterdammerung. Wagner finished a poem in He must have made crucial determinations three acts late in November 1848, and the fol- about such things as the formal plan at this early lowing January he added a prologue before Act I. stage, but with his later operas, at least, there Withis this he achieved a dramatic structure for precious little documentary evidence showing the act that already suggests the development of how he planned them in musical terms. An im- musical plans. The essential details of that portant feature of Wagner's later works is the structure are presented in schematic form in preparation of their musical structure in the diagram 3 (page 61); it is fundamentally the structure of the poem itself; musical decisions same as that of Gotterdammerung, Act I. 48 This content downloaded from 70.103.220.4 on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 23:11:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms from Weimar never materialized. In addition, ROBERT Dramatically, this act has three main parts, BAILEY which are separated by orchestral interludes he evidently felt it necessary to mull over the The Evolution with closed curtain. The poem of Siegfrieds Tod problems of this new style for a while longer of the Ring specifies that the first of these interludes is to before attempting to realize it on a large scale. include Siegfried's horn call heard from a dis- Instead he wrote Opera and Drama that au- tance, and that the orchestra is then to take up tumn and early winter. And when he returned the horn call and develop it in a "powerful to the Nibelung materials the following spring, movement" after the curtain closes.' Each of he created an entirely new dramatic poem as a the three main parts of the act is in turn divided companion piece for Siegfrieds Tod -the com- into two scenes. Siegfried, the central character, edy Der junge Siegfried. has a structural function here, for his entrances The idea of pairing a comic drama with a serve to define the second half of each part. tragic one was not new, even for Wagner, as is To separate the two scenes in Parts I and III,well known. Immediately after he had com- the poem provides for an orchestral interlude pleted the music for Tannhduser, and before with open curtain, and Briinnhilde actually that opera was given its premiere in Dresden, sings during the interlude in Part III, after the Wagner conceived Die Meistersinger as a comic Valkyries have left the stage. In the middle part, pendant to the tragedy. The two dramas would however, there is no interlude, and Siegfried's contrast two historical epochs and two artistic entrance by itself serves the purpose of struc- movements, the aristocratic Minnesinger of the tural articulation. fourteenth century and the bourgeois Meister- Meanwhile Wagner balanced vocal registers singer of the sixteenth. Instead of realizing this in such a way that the opening halves of Parts plan, I Wagner went on to write Lohengrin, con- and III involve female voices only: the three ceived soon after Die Meistersinger, and the Norns in Part I and Briinnhilde and the female comedy was set aside for a good many years, by chorus of Valkyries in Part III (this was changed which time it became a considerably different to Briinnhilde and just one sister, Waltraute, in kind of opera from the mere comic addition to Gotterddmmerung). The second halves of these Tannhauser that he had initially envisioned. two parts are also symmetrical in that they be- In the case of the Nibelung dramas, Wagner long to Siegfried and Brfinnhilde alone. The designed the comedy to precede the tragedy, so middle part contrasts with the other two by in- that the pair of works would contrast two gen- troducing the new characters-Gunther, Gut- erations, focusing on the youth of the hero in rune, and Hagen-with Siegfried added at the the first and on his downfall in middle age in the midpoint. As already noted, there is no orches- second. Wagner did not change the titles of tral interlude here, and that feature provides athese two operas until 1856, after he had further element of contrast. finished the music for Die Walkfire. The change The musical sketches that Wagner made for in title from Der junge Siegfried to plain Sieg- Siegfrieds Tod during the summer of 1850 con- fried has incidentally had the unfortunate side- cern only two passages in this structure, a draft effect of obscuring for many viewers the lapse of for the opening scene of the Norns, which actu- a generation that occurs between this opera and ally continues about a quarter of the way into Gotterddmmerung. the scene for Brfinnhilde and Siegfried, plus In the latter part of the summer of 1851, music for the Valkyries in the first half of Part Wagner began sketches for the music of Der III.2 Wagner put aside his work on the music, junge Siegfried. He had just written the essay A since the commission that he had hoped to have Communication to My Friends, in which he explored still further the aesthetic problems he had been posing for himself. On September 2, 1851, he wrote to his friend Theodor Uhlig: 'Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 4th edn. (Leipzig, 1907), II, 173. 2These sketches are discussed in some detail in my essay I am now beginning the music, with which I really "Wagner's Musical Sketches for Siegfrieds Tod," in Studies propose to enjoy myself. You cannot even imagine in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. Harold Pow- what is happening quite of its own accord. I tell you, ers (Princeton, 1968), pp. 459-94. the musical phrases are making themselves for these 49 This content downloaded from 70.103.220.4 on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 23:11:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH stanzas and periods, without my even having which hasto takethree acts and a prologue. In the CENTURY pains with them. It's all growing out of Rheingoldthe ground score, as the opening scene and the if it were wild. I already have the beginning in mind, MUSIC three "acts" that follow are simply numbered as and also some plastic motives such as Fafner.3 four scenes. Das Rheingold begins on a precon- The Fafner motive may have been in scious Wagner's level, with the opening scene evoking a mind for some time before he wrote state to of Uhlig, moral innocence; that scene thus stands since the poem for Der junge Siegfried, outside written the main action and time sequence of in June, actually mentions that the themotive Ring. Consciousis to action, and the central se- appear in the first-act monologue for quence Mime of eventsjust in the dramatic cycle, begin before the Wanderer enters4-a monologue with scene 2. In a fundamental sense, then, the later deleted from the drama. In addition, introductory scene in the Rhine functions as a sketches for the motives of the Forest Bird exist, prologue, while the structure of the main action contrasts the two scenes on the mountain and they may have been made at this time. A larger number of different musical fragments is height before Valhalla with the intervening involved here than was the case when Wagner scene in Nibelheim.
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