Steven Wadsworth’s 2001 production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung opens with the three Norns standing in the depths of a rocky chasm, spinning their knowledge of past and future. The set, designed by Thomas Lynch, brings to mind the gorges of the Grand Canyon, whose differently hued layers record the passage of geological time. The rocky backdrop renders visible the ancient wisdom of the Norns and the temporal distance of the events they chronicle, especially the story of Wotan and the world-ash. Wagner’s music, too, recapitulates its own history by recalling leitmotifs linked to the agents and actions depicted by the Norns. More remotely, the scenery calls to mind Wagner’s efforts to plumb the submerged linguistic and cultural seams of the German psyche, which he believed lay dormant beneath more recent deposits of French-dominated civilization. In the Wadsworth–Lynch production, the prologue to Götterdämmerung becomes a veritable allegory of depth, one with nearly as many layers as the rock face on stage.

With its connotations of profundity and distant origins, it is no surprise that depth enjoys a distinguished position in the lexicon of Western metaphors – so distinguished that pinning down its provenance and meaning, even in the relatively limited sphere of music history, might seem an insurmountable task. From scholarly and journalistic promises of deeper investigations and in-depth inquiries to Jack Handey’s splendidly oblique “Deep Thoughts,” from fears of postmodern depthlessness to advertisements promoting a “deeper” internet, depth metaphors are equally at home in high culture and pop culture, humor and advertising, art and science. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s study Metaphors We Live By argues that several basic cognitive metaphors converge in the notion of depth, giving it a semantic complexity that thwarts easy synopsis. Even the most cursory survey of writings on music would show that musical works are routinely praised for their deep emotional or spiritual impact, probed for their deep meanings, and pried apart for clues to their deep structure. It would be folly to suppose that a single study could address the sum total of usage in the case of such a wide-ranging metaphor. My intention here is rather more modest: to explore the manifold functions and ramifications of depth metaphors in a critical tradition of special relevance to modern musical scholarship – the German tradition of music criticism and analysis spanning the period from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth.