On the Eve of Two Revolutions

IN THE SUMMER AND FALL of 1848 Richard Wagner stood on the brink of two revolutions, one of which seemed to him and his contemporaries far more momentous than the other. History has judged otherwise. The political revolution that would, in a few months, sweep Wagner into its toils and leave him a wanted fugitive was ultimately only one in a series of attempts to unify Germany and move toward something other than a collection of tiny states under aristocratic absolutism. The unification movement took another twentyodd years and ended with a compromise that would never have satisfied such young revolutionaries as Richard Wagner, August Röckel, or the “anarchist from outside,” Mikhail Bakunin. At the same time, Wagner was moving toward a musical and dramatic revolution that he associated with the political, but which would change the musical and operatic landscape forever. Operas composed in the twentieth and even the twenty-first century are still poised on the border between music and drama that Wagner defined in his theoretical writings of the following five years. The composer's role in both revolutions has been explored ad nauseam, but the situation of the Nibelung legend just before it blossomed out into Wagner's monumental tetralogy has only been touched upon.

In 1848 Wagner was thirty-five years old and had composed six of his thirteen operas (only three of which the composer recognized as belonging to the “Wagner canon”). Three (Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer, and Tannhäuser) had been performed in Dresden, where he was Kapellmeister (i.e. one of two conductors with administrative duties) at the Royal Court Theater. Lohengrin, which had been completed earlier in 1848, had been rejected for performance in Dresden and was awaiting a premiere. He was becoming increasingly disaffected with his situation in Dresden and sought an outlet for his energies in politics, a move that in a few months would spell the end of his time in Dresden and of his tenure as royal Kapellmeister.

It is impossible to determine when the idea of writing an opera on the Nibelung legend first entered Wagner's mind. Like most nationalistic Germans of his time, he had been drawn to the material because of its importance to “Germanic” culture, but — as we shall see — he was unhappy with its most famous incarnation, the Middle High German Nibelungenlied.