“You offer to me the artistic association which might bring ‘Siegfried’ to light. I demand representatives of heroes, such as our stage has not yet seen; where are they to come from? Not from the air, but from the earth, for I believe you are in a good way to make them grow from the earth by dint of your inspiring care.... Well, then, as soon as you have produced ‘Lohengrin’ to your own satisfaction, I shall also produce my ‘Siegfried,’ but only for you and for Weimar. Two days ago I should not have believed that I should come to this resolution; I owe it to you.”[[2]]
WAHNFRIED.
The home of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. From a photograph.
The immediately subsequent letters are full of his determination soon to begin work on “Siegfried’s Death”; but when he attempted it, he found that there was too much explanatory matter, and he decided to embody that in a prefatory drama to be called “Young Siegfried.” Here again, however, he found the same difficulty, and on Nov. 20, 1851, he writes to Liszt that “this ‘Young Siegfried’ also is no more than a fragment.” He continues thus:—
“Two principal motives of my myth, therefore, remain to be represented, both of which are hinted at in ‘Young Siegfried,’ the first in the long narrative of Brünnhilde after her awakening (Act III.), and the second in the scene between Alberich and the Wanderer in the second act, and between the Wanderer and Mime in the first. That to this I was led not only by artistic reflection, but by the splendid and, for the purpose of representation, extremely rich material of these motives, you will readily understand when you consider the subject more closely. Think then of the wondrously fatal love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, of Wotan, in his deep, mysterious relation to that love, in his dispute with Fricka, in his terrible self-contention when, for the sake of custom, he decrees the death of Siegmund; finally of the glorious Valkyrie Brünnhilde, as, divining the innermost thought of Wotan, she disobeys the god, and is punished by him; consider this wealth of motive indicated in the scene between the Wanderer and the Wala, and at greater length in the above-mentioned tale of Brünnhilde, as the material of a drama which precedes the two ‘Siegfrieds’; and you will understand that it was not reflection, but rather enthusiasm, which inspired my latest plan. That plan extends to three dramas: (1) ‘The Valkyrie’; (2) ‘Young Siegfried’; (3) ‘Siegfried’s Death.’ In order to give everything completely, these three dramas must be preceded by a grand introductory play, ‘The Rape of the Rhinegold.’ The object is the complete representation of everything in regard to this rape; the origin of the Nibelung treasure, the possession of that treasure by Wotan, and the curse of Alberich, which in ‘Young Siegfried’ occur in the form of narration.”
RICHARD WAGNER’S STUDIO IN BAYREUTH.
From a photograph of a painting by R. Steche.
Thus we find him impelled by the demands as well as the artistic possibilities of a fruitful story to the construction of his great tetralogy, consisting of the dramas eventually named “Das Rheingold” (“The Rhinegold”), “Die Walküre” (“The Valkyrie”), “Siegfried,” and “Die Götterdämmerung” (“The Dusk of the Gods”). A further incentive to the creation of this four-part work was his belief that the true lyric play should be modelled after the Greek drama, in whose literature he found the trilogy of Æschylus—the “Agamemnon,” “Chœphoræ,” and “Eumenides” and “The Seven against Thebes,” believed to have been the final play of a tetralogy. He began to labor at this gigantic undertaking without any definite hope of its performance; indeed, with doubts as to his living to complete it. So great, however, was his enthusiasm that, in spite of the formidable artistic problems which he had to solve and the novelty and complexity of his own musico-dramatic system, now to be developed for the first time to its logical outcome, he had the poem completed and printed for private circulation early in 1853.[[3]]
“During the summer of 1853 he visited a place near Saint Maurice, and from there he undertook a trip into the North of Italy.... It was during a sleepless night at Spezzia that the first ideas of the ‘Rheingold’ music passed through his mind. He brought his journey to an end, and hastened to regain his tranquil home at Zurich, that he might not commence such a work on Italian soil.”[[4]] The score of “Das Rheingold” was completed in May, 1854. The next month he began “Die Walküre” and finished all save the instrumentation in the winter of 1854–55. The score was done in 1856, and in 1857 most of the first two acts of “Siegfried” were composed and orchestrated. His labors had been interrupted by the production of “Tannhäuser” at Zurich in 1855, by a visit from his best of friends, Liszt, and by a journey to London to conduct the concerts of the Philharmonic Society from March to June, 1855. He felt that he must accept this engagement or, as he said in a letter to Praeger, “renounce the public and all relations with it once and for all.”[[5]]
