Commentary

WAGNER THOUGHT ENOUGH OF HIS Siegfried's Tod, written in November 1848, to include it in his collected works in a form close to its original. The published text was translated into English by William Ashton Ellis and included in 1899 as part of the final volume of his Richard Wagner's Prose Works. Wagner's verse is generally understandable, if ornate and occasionally ponderous, but a translation should not be more difficult to read than the original. Ashton Ellis felt called upon to try to match, if not exceed, Wagner's stylistic excesses in his translations, and the results are sometimes impenetrable. As an example, here is a short passage from Alberich's speech to Hagen near the beginning of act 2 in Wagner's original:

Ashton Ellis rendered the lines this way:

Wagner's German is clarity itself next to Ashton Ellis's “English.”

With the goal of translating simply what Wagner wrote, I have tried to maintain a line-by-line correspondence, but it has not always worked, and some pairs of lines have fallen victim to the differences between (Wagner’s) German and English syntax. The result is certainly not singable, nor does it set out to provide a truly poetic text, but it should fulfill its purpose of informing the serious student of Wagner's Ring where the journey to Der Ring des Nibelungen began, just as the composer intended when he published this early version of the drama.

As I have already mentioned, Wagner wrote musical sketches for the earliest parts of Siegfried's Tod, but he needed the theoretical underpinnings he would work out in the pages of Oper und Drama, the most important of his theoretical writings during the early Zurich period, before he could produce something usable in the new musical language he invented for the Ring. Even then, it took him several years to work out the textual changes that would later find their way into Der Ring des Nibelungen.