In May 1913, the Woolfs heard Wagner's Ring at Covent Garden. It was at least the fifth cycle Woolf had attended since her first in 1898 and it was to be her last. She wrote to Ka Cox:

Woolf's disenchantment appears unequivocal. Characterising the Ring as bellicose, domineering and debilitating, her wearied account is unsurprising in the context of rising nationalist and patriotic rhetoric during the advent of the First World War: in this period, Wagner was central to debates about the relationship between music and what Kramer calls ‘socio-cultural agency’, as he is for many still. Yet Woolf's enduring engagement with Wagner was far more unresolved than this ‘break’ suggests – though it is suggestive that she sets the long Wagner scene in The Years in 1910, the year when ‘human character changed’ (E, III: 421).