In the years since its inception, Wagner’s Ring has generated significant commentary and controversy. Critics of the Ring asserted its influence in public discourse (beyond music criticism of the work and its performances) and generated ambitious intellectual and ideological debates about art, society, and politics. This chapter charts some milestones in these debates, including the contributions of well-known thinkers such as Nietzsche, Shaw, and Adorno, but also some of their French, German, or Russian contemporaries whose influence has waned since the fin de siècle. In the twentieth century, seminal musicological approaches emerged that transcend analytical-technical matters, such as Alfred Lorenz’s ideologically charged investigations of Wagnerian form or Richard Donington’s psychoanalytic explanations. More recently the task of interpreting the Ring has shifted from the written word to the operatic stage, where directors explore and expose its various and conflicting layers of meaning. Whether formulated by philosophers, writers, musicologists, or artists, two basic approaches emerge from these interpretations: They either develop a social or political interpretation from the Ring outward, or they insert the tetralogy into a preexisting worldview.

Although operas like Heinrich Hofmann's Armin or Edmund Kretschmer's Die Folkunger close with jubilation for the reunited couples and celebratory choruses of their liberated people, such happy endings became increasingly rare as the century proceeded. While tragic conclusions had long been the rule across the European operatic traditions, towards the fin de siècle the mandatory death(s) of the protagonist(s) acquired a striking transcendental dimension that had not been as conspicuous earlier in the nineteenth century. The finale of Grammann's opera Thusnelda is a case in point. The eponymous heroine is ridiculed by the Romans, refuses to join the Germanic rescue mission and stabs herself. Her death is the signal for the Germanic legionaries to kill themselves and to rejoin the fatherland in death. As Thusnelda dies, an electric ray of light falls on her head, surrounding it like a halo. She envisages the hall of the gods and Hermann welcoming her, and prophesies that German warriors will invade Rome victoriously. Her dying scene, therefore, points beyond the actual plot towards a brighter future and a higher purpose, which ennobles her suicide into a sacrifice for the (future) German nation. Her Roman adversary Germanicus acknowledges this deeper meaning by placing his laurel wreath on her body.

From such a finale it is only a small step to the ‘redemption operas’ (Erlösungsopern) of the post-Wagnerian generation. Contemporary critics and modern musicologists alike have observed a preference for plots that hinge on redemptive acts in various forms and shapes.

If a survey had been conducted among nineteenth-century concert-goers, asking them which musical genre they considered the most typically German, the majority would probably have replied, ‘The symphony’. German-language opera struggled to assert its independence of Italian and French models; choral works were not held in high esteem as aesthetic objects in their own right since they were too closely intertwined with the national festival culture. Symphonic music, in contrast, could boast both a venerable tradition and aesthetic superiority. The latter had been established in the literary writings of the early Romantic school, who regarded large-scale instrumental music without any obvious extraneous function as the ‘purest’ and hence the ‘highest’ of all art forms. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven represented the symphonic heritage; particularly Beethoven's works became paradigms of both the symphonic and the German, prompting Robert Schumann to open a review of new symphonies with the following observation:

If German national identity was in a permanent state of crisis and redefinition throughout the nineteenth century, the same can be said of German national opera. Until Wagner's music dramas finally – and not without controversy – came to be adopted as the ‘soundtrack’ of the German Empire in the 1870s, the search for an appropriate and recognisable operatic idiom remained an ongoing concern. The two operas discussed in this chapter, Heinrich Dorn's Die Nibelungen (1854) and Carl Amand Mangold's Gudrun (1851), made significant and at the time most welcome contributions to the problematic genre by transforming epic poetry from the treasure-trove of medieval German literature into glorifications of the national character. ‘Treue’ (loyalty or constancy) and ‘Freiheitsliebe’ (love of freedom) are central to the two operas, which have been chosen not just for their topicality – no discussion of German national myth would be complete without consideration of the Nibelung tradition – but also for the impassioned responses they engendered in contemporary observers who eagerly tested each new artwork for its suitability as the desired national opera.

The creation of a national theatre and by extension a national opera can in itself be considered an act of cultural politics, a project that was intended to elevate the German language to the serious stage and to remove the perceived hegemony of foreign drama and opera. From the late eighteenth century onwards opera had been an essential item on the agenda of progressive thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder.

Despite the high density of theatres across the German-speaking countries, where the music-loving public could experience new operas even in many provincial towns, most people encountered large-scale works in the form of choral music, either as active singers in one of the many mixed or male choirs or as part of the sizeable audiences attracted by concerts and music festivals. For the Vormärz years James Garratt rightly considers the choral movement and its manifestations the ‘principal forum for mass amateur musical participation’, a forum that emphasised not the outstanding creative effort of the individual – though the choral movement had its fair share of genius worship – but rather the experience of a collective united in and through art. In the context of nineteenth-century Germany, such unity was first and foremost imagined to reside in a national community, and time and again the ‘harmony’ of the assembled singing multitude was interpreted as anticipating the harmonious nation that unification would engender. Mixed and male-voice choirs often recruited from the same social strata and shared many ideals, such as the free association of like-minded people or the leading role of the educated middle classes in the sphere of culture. Although both types of choral association congregated at increasingly massive festivals in order to ‘display in monumental form the cohesion and collective strength of the middle classes’, they set their priorities slightly differently. Mixed choirs found their most prestigious outlet in the genre of the oratorio, mainly performed at concerts and music festivals that emphasised the collective aesthetic experience in moral and religious terms that made them adequate – if not obvious – vehicles for the national cause.

In 1844, at a time of great expectations, the philosopher and critic Friedrich Theodor Vischer prophesied a new departure for German music:

Vischer's plea for a national art is nothing less than a wake-up call to his composing contemporaries to make music as relevant for the German nation as literature had long been. While German music already excelled in the fields of all-embracing humanism, sublime learnedness, brilliant wit and romantic idyll, it had yet to take up the mantle of Shakespeare and Schiller: a heroic art inspired by the great events of a national past that would – like the natural forces invoked in the sea metaphor – sweep away his compatriots in a great surge of elation.

While Richard Wagner had declared as early as 1851 that historical topics were utterly obsolete for artistic purposes, such operas were still very much alive at the time of the completion and first performance of the Ring cycle. Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, both recognisably set in the medieval period, were just reaching the height of their popularity on German stages in the years of the Reichsgründung, and some of the most successful operas of the 1870s centred on historical subject matter while following the traditional format of grand opéra. Cosima Wagner herself had to admit that the genre continued to have contemporary appeal when she noted in 1879:

Of these three operas, which in the 1870s were amongst the most widely performed and which in the short run were certainly more successful than Wagner's contemporary music dramas, Armin was the only one based on a story from German national history, which explains its obvious patriotism. The story of the Germanic leader Arminius/Hermann was not just one of the many heroic narratives from early German history, but the key to the national imagination.