Wagner’s Ring in 1848: New Translations of the Nibelung Myth and Siegfried’s Death by Edward R. Haymes (review)

‘Der Ring des Nibelungen is one of the most ambitious works of art ever attempted. ... If we want to understand Wagner’s creative process as well as his attitude towards myth, history and politics, we must look at the operatic project he settled on in the last few months before the uprising in Dresden that cost him his position and almost his life’ (p. 2). The problem with any study of Wagner’s early sketches for the Ring, as Edward Haymes identifies it, is that ‘we cannot read his early sketches today without thinking of what became of them’ (p. 6). In this absorbing study Haymes addresses this difficulty by setting himself what he describes as the artificial time limit of 31 December 1848. This may seem an arbitrary boundary, but it has the twin virtues of concentrating attention on the origins of the work in the Europe of pre-1848 as the revolutionary movements that were to sweep the Continent gathered momentum, and on the Nibelungen drama as originally conceived by Wagner. Haymes thankfully makes no claim to add to the mass of interpretation already available; rather it is his stated intention to provide detailed scrutiny of Wagner’s sources and new translations of material significant in the early genesis of the Ring a point of departure for further study.

‘The Nibelung Legend did not become part of the popular consciousness, even among educated Germans, until the Romantic interest in the Middle Ages combined with the German patriotism that was generated in the Napoleonic wars’ (p. 11). This was the historical context in which Wagner conceived his Nibelung drama and that forms the background to the entire project. The two most important documents in these early stirrings of what was to become the Ring are, in Haymes’s translations, The Nibelung Myth as Draft for Drama (Wagner’s draft dated 4 October 1848) and the dramatic poem Siegfried’s Death (12–28 November 1848). Both are newly translated and presented with Wagner’s original German on the facing page for ease of reference. In the extensive Introduction, ‘Wagner’s Nibelungs in 1848’, Haymes navigates through the labyrinthine and often bewildering complexities of Wagner’s sources with rare skill in what is something of a scholarly tour de force of concise historical exegesis. He gives an absorbing and detailed account of how the Nibelung legend became part of the lingua franca of the developing sense of national identity that fed the heady revolutionary fervour of 1848. In the course of his exegesis, Haymes rightly gives prominence to earlier studies, e.g. Elizabeth Magee’s seminal Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs (1990). He also, by considering the contents of Wagner’s pre-1849 Dresden Library, sheds interesting new light on familiar material. It may not be generally known, for example, that Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (1835) was largely responsible for Wagner’s ideas about valkyries, gods, and dwarves. Haymes places considerable importance on historical context; it is therefore surprising that he makes no mention of Franz Brendel’s exhortation in 1845 that ‘in my view a setting of the Nibelung opera would indeed be a step forward, and I believe that the composer who could accomplish this task in an adequate manner would be the man of his era’. The idea of the Nibelung legend as suitable material for an opera was thus already abroad in the public consciousness when Wagner took up the gauntlet and gradually formed in his mind a version that made sense to him.

In manipulating the medieval material for his own dramatic purposes Wagner drew not only on the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, but also on the Icelandic poetry and prose of the Eddas, the Völsungasaga, and the Thidrekssaga. To Wagner and his contemporaries, the Icelandic sagas were material from a specifically Germanic rather than...