The Ring and its Times

The Social and Political Background to the Tetralogy

Barry Millington

Wagner’s Ring and its Icelandic Sources
Stofnun Sigurðar Nordals 1995

This paper discusses the chief philosophical, social and political influences on Wagner and the Ring. The influence of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer is well known, but that of Hegel has generally been overlooked. By re-examining the Ring against the background of Hegelian thought — in particular the ideas of mutual recognition and the master/slave relationship — it is hoped to arrive at a clearer picture of what Wagner was attempting to say in his magnum opus. The work’s political content is examined against the background of contemporary revolutionary thought (Proudhon, Marx, Stirner and Bakunin) and in the light of George Bernard Shaw’s Perfect Wagnerite, which anticipated the politically orientated stage productions of postwar years by several decades.

An amusing story is told in Friedrich Pecht’s memoirs of how he visited Wagner in Dresden to find the composer immersed in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Wagner, in great excitement, read a passage aloud, but was then, to their mutual hilarity, quite unable to explain it. That Wagner tells us little in Mein Leben about his attempts to grapple with the complexities of Hegelian thought is not altogether surprising. By the time he came to dictate his autobiography, pure Hegelianism was all but extinct in Germany, and Wagner had in any case decided that he had more in common with the philosophy of Schopenhauer.

In fact, already by the Dresden decade of the 1840s, the influence of Hegel was being felt primarily through the radical reinterpretation of the Young Hegelians. And it is their outlook, chiefly as articulated by Ludwig Feuerbach, that has been seen to have had the greatest impact on Wagner during the years of the genesis of the Ring.

I hope to give here some idea of the chief philosophical, social and political influences on Wagner and the Ring. Reference has already been made to Feuerbach, the German philosopher whose influence on intellectuals generally in the 1840s was immense, and whose influence on the Ring is evident everywhere. For Feuerbach the essence of human nature, and the source of its morality, is the “I — you” relationship. Morality is inconceivable for the solitary being; only in conjunction with another, by creating a mutual drive to happiness, does an individual develop any consciousness of social responsibility. The love affairs of Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walküre, and Siegfried and Brünnhilde later in the cycle, embody this kind of lifeaffirming philosophy.

The philosopher whose name is linked most commonly with the Ring is Arthur Schopenhauer. His influence was indeed of fundamental importance, though it has often, as we shall see, been allowed to exclude other crucial influences.

Schopenhauer’s importance to Wagner was twofold. In the first place, his aesthetic outlook, which elevated music above the other media, offered Wagner the perfect intellectual justification for his own evolving position on the subject. But it was his philosophy of pessimism that really struck a chord with the composer when he first read him in the autumn of 1854. Existence, according to Schopenhauer, is a constant round of suffering alleviated occasionally by pleasure, which, however, is a mere release from pain. Suffering is the inevitable consequence of the “will to live”; only denial of the will, in annihilation or the Buddhist state of nirvana, can effect deliverance.

These are ideas which resonate through the Ring. In an enthralling monologue in Act 2 scene 2 of Die Walküre, for example, Wotan comes movingly to terms with the driving forces of ambition and lust for power that have dominated his life. Now he relinquishes all such claims, and looks forward merely to “the end”, i.e. the Schopenhauerian/Buddhist state of oblivion.

The links between Die Walküre and Schopenhauerian philosophy are particularly clear, because the impact of Die Welt als Wille and Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, was still fresh in Wagner’s mind as he was working on the opera. Before that fateful encounter of autumn 1854, however, the chief philosophical influences on Wagner had been those of Feuerbach, Hegel and Proudhon.

The French political writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon published his seminal Qu’est-ce que la propriété? in Paris in 1840, actually while Wagner was resident in that city. It seems that Wagner did not read the book for himself until the summer of 1849, by which time the synopsis for the Ring story was already drafted. And yet, there are clear parallels. The notion that the protection of property is a crime against nature, and that without the evil of property there would be no crimes against property, finds its dramatic counterpart in Das Rheingold. Proudhon’s slogan “property is theft” is encapsulated in the symbol of the ring: as a source of wealth, it puts temptation in everybody’s way and invites theft.

No doubt Proudhon’s ideas, like Feuerbach’s, were common currency in progressive circles around the time of the 1848–9 Revolution. Certainly Wagner’s notion of free, unconditional love owes a great deal to Proudhon. True love could not be subjugated to the law or to the institution of marriage — the mere establishment and perpetuation of property rights — declared Wagner, echoing both Proudhon and Feuerbach.

All the marriages depicted or referred to in the Ring are loveless. That of Wotan and Fricka, for example, is both loveless and sterile. Sieglinde is held in bondage by Hunding, while his kinsmen, according to Siegmund’s narration, treat their womenfolk with little more respect. True love, on the other hand, is found only outside marriage — as with Siegfried and Brünnhilde — or even between brother and sister (Siegmund and Sieglinde).

Wagner’s critique was directed, of course, not only against feudal sexual relations in mythological times, but also against the situation obtaining in his own day, as is quite clear from his various writings of the time. Similarly, the Ring contains a critique of production relations, of the destructive, alienating power of capital, and of exploitation and oppression in both industrial and social spheres. Not merely a tale about the adventures of gods, giants, dwarves and dragons, it is an allegory of the conflicts that arise when civilization and power politics obtrude on the innocent world of nature. Social contracts and institutions, based invariably on property rights and hierarchies of power, contaminate the natural order of things.

If some of the terminology used here is Marxist, that is no accident. Wagner was not personally acquainted with Marx and probably not with his writings either. But his own idiosyncratic brand of anti-capitalism is rooted in the social and political outlook of the revolutionaries and radicals of the time.

At least up until the 1848 revolution Wagner’s political outlook had much in common with that of Marx. He wanted to see existing bourgeois conditions restructured, an end to private property, the destruction of the power of capital, the abolition of marriage in as much as it reinforced economic servitude, and the cultivation of a new moral world order. As the German writer Udo Bermbach has pointed out: “All of these are ideas which, in both content and even in their justification, bear a marked resemblance to many of the statements and demands contained in the Communist Manifesto of 1848.”

One of the first commentators to discuss the Ring as a political allegory was George Bernard Shaw, in his book The Perfect Wagnerite, dating from 1898. This was a book that was way ahead of its time. Nobody before, to my knowledge, had so clearly, or in such detail, discussed the Ring in these terms. Nor, equally interestingly, did anybody else alight on this truth for some time to come. Certainly, stage productions in the traditional manner showed no inkling of the fact, and it was not until the productions by the East German Joachim Herz in the early 1970s, the centenary production at Bayreuth in 1976 by Patrice Chéreau, and subsequently those by Harry Kupfer and others that this aspect of the work was brought home to many people.

Shaw is at his best in describing the first opera of the cycle, Das Rheingold, in which the allegory is clearest. The opera tells how the dwarf Alberich acquires the magic ring by renouncing love. He uses it to amass fabulous wealth and plans one day to rule the world. Shaw continues:

And now what forces are there in the world to resist Alberic, our dwarf, in his new character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon at work wielding the power of the gold. For his gain, hordes of his fellow creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably, overground and underground, lashed to their work by the invisible whip of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims of our “dangerous trades” ever see the shareholders whose power is nevertheless everywhere, driving them to destruction. The very wealth they create with their labor becomes an additional force to impoverish them; for as fast as they make it it slips from their hands into the hands of their master, and makes him mightier than ever. You can see the process for yourself in every civilized country today, where millions of people toil in want and disease to heap up more wealth for our Alberics, laying up nothing for themselves, except sometimes horrible and agonizing disease and the certainty of premature death.

As the English historian Anthony Arblaster has written: “The whole of the third scene of Das Rhinegold, including, of course, the prelude and the postlude with their insistent hammerings, are the most vivid evocation of the dark, harsh world of early industrial capitalism in nineteeth-century music.”

Shaw reminds us, however, that Alberich’s domain does not have to be a mine: it could equally be a match factory with plenty of clergymen shareholders. Or it could be a chemical works or a pottery, or a tailoring shop or a bakery or any of the other places where human life and welfare are daily sacrificed in order to heap up wealth for a power-hungry entrepreneur.

Now, Alberich has set his brother Mime, who of course is enslaved like everyone else, to make him a magic helmet, the Tarnhelm, which will render the wearer invisible or allow him to adopt any shape he chooses. “This helmet is a very common article in our streets,” Shaw goes on, “where it generally takes the form of a tall hat. It makes a man invisible as a shareholder, and changes him into various shapes, such as a pious Christian, a subscriber to hospitals, a benefactor of the poor, a model husband and father, a shrewd, practical, independent Englishman, and what not, when he is really a pitiful parasite on the commonwealth, consuming a great deal, and producing nothing.”

In between his discussion of Das Rheingold and the next opera, Die Walküre, Shaw interpolates a chapter called “Wagner as Revolutionist”, in which he defends his allegory against those who might argue that Wagner had no such thing in mind. He does it quite simply by pointing to the facts of the case, that Wagner was an active revolutionary, wanted by the police, that he turned out essay after essay on the subject of the revolutionary potential of art, and here it was put into practice. He then goes on to make a important point about the Ring which is still often misunderstood. “The danger is,” he says, “that you will jump to the conclusion that: the gods ,,are a higher order than the human order. On the contrary, the world is waiting for Man to redeem it from the lame and cramped government of the gods. Once grasp that; and the allegory becomes simple enough.”

This is a very important point, because many people have tended to assume that the gods, led by Wotan, represent the highest state of development: that they are essentially noble, if compromised. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wotan is shown in Das Rheingold as a greedy, grasping, desperate individual with fearsome ambitions — no more noble than Alberich’s — to rule the world. It is because the race of gods is corrupt and doomed that the human hero Siegmund, and after him Siegfried, has to be groomed.

When Wagner said to his friend Rockel about Wotan: “Observe him closely! He resembles us to a tee; he is the sum total of present-day intelligence”(letter of 25/26 January 1854), he by no means meant this as a compliment. On the contrary, this was the kind of intelligence, the kind of mentality that Wagner wanted to see swept away, and in its place a new humanity, proud and free, unfettered by either economic domination or religious tyranny. Shaw puts this eloquently: “All the loftier spirits of that time were burning to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him out of his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his own imagination, of attributing the good that sprang from the ceaseless energy of the life within himself to some superior power in the clouds, and of making a fetish of self-sacrifice to justify his own cowardice.”

Shaw the unbeliever naturally makes a great deal out of this. He makes a devastating point when he refers to Wotan’s daughters, the Valkyries, as a host of warriors thoroughly indoctrinated “with the conventional system of law and duty, supernatural religion and self-sacrificing idealism, which they believe to be the essence of [Wotan’s] godhood, but which is really only the machinery of the love of necessary power which is his mortal weakness.”

And he makes a more controversial, but I think very interesting point later when he suggests that the flames, with which Wotan surrounds his disobedient daughter Brünnhilde on the rock, are the flames of hell. They are only the appearance of a consuming fire, he says. If a man will walk boldly into that fire, he will discover it at once to be a lie, an illusion. They are simply the flames of hell with which the masses have for generations been terrorised into intimidation and subjection: “a well-kept secret of the thinking and governing classes,” he calls it.

So we have two interlinked ideas here. First, Wotan the god represents organized religion, which has “established its dominion over the world by a mighty Church, compelling obedience through its ally the Law, with its formidable State organization of force of arms and cunning of brain”. Second, that entity, though nominally divine, is far from benevolent. This perception of the gods as corrupt, power-hungry and generally a nasty piece of work has informed many, if not the majority of stage productions in recent years. Reactionaries still protest that the gods are not represented as gods; but this is to misunderstand the whole point of Wagner’s scenario — as Shaw pointed out nearly a century ago.

Wagner’s worldview when he embarked on the Ring was thus coloured by the ideas of the prevailing radicals of the era. One radical Wagner did get to know personally at this time was Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist who was himself a personal acquaintance of Marx, Engels and other leading socialists. Bakunin’s influence is clear in some of Wagner’s writings of the period, as is the “anarchistic egoism” of Max Stirner, with its celebration of the freedom of the individual.

We have seen that two of the chief philosophical influences on the Ring were those of Schopenhauer and Feuerbach. If it be wondered how two diametrically opposed concepts — the sombre, pessimistic Schopenhauerian and the joyous, affirmative Feuerbachian — could be embraced simultaneously, the answer lies in the vast range of ideas and sources drawn on in the Ring, and the lengthy period (nearly a quarter of a century) from its inception to its completion. Attempts to pin down the essence of the work without taking all these diverse, and sometimes contradictory, elements into account are doomed to failure.

If Feuerbach’s influence on the Ring has too often been glossed over in favour of that of Schopenhauer (lazily following Wagner’s own representation of the matter), then that of Hegel has until recently been virtually ignored. The impact of Hegel’s philosophy on 19th-century German thought was colossal, and it should be no surprise to find that the Ring reflects that fact.

And yet, as the American writer Sandra Corse demonstrates, in her brilliantly perceptive and closely argued study of language and love in the Ring, there can be no doubt that Wagner studied carefully Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind and absorbed much of its thinking direct. Without denying the extent to which Hegel’s ideas were also mediated for Wagner by Feuerbach, Corse argues that an understanding of Wagner’s reception of Hegel is essential to a full appreciation of the Ring. The following comments are indebted to Corse’s study.

First there is the fact that Wagner looked beyond Feuerbach to Hegel “for many of the details of the notion of self-realization as well as for the idea of necessity as the moving spirit of history”. The concept of self-realization, a process by which characters achieve a state of enlightenment or self-awareness as a result of the experiences they have undergone, is central to Wagner’s works.

The process typically takes the form of “mutual recognition” (a fundamental notion of Hegel’s) and it is this concept that underlies the self-sacrifice which so many of Wagner’s chief characters, especially his heroines, are called upon to undertake. According to Hegel’s scheme, the individual moves through a series of stages in the pursuit of a state of higher consciousness. Wagner picked up not only the idea of stages of consciousness, but also two specific social relationships explored by Hegel: that of two individuals who recognize themselves in each other, and that of the master and slave.

The relationships of Siegmund/Sieglinde and Siegfried/Brünnhilde are fundamentally and unequivocally ones dealing with a process of mutual recognition. Each looks for, and finds, a reflection of the self in the partner: an identification that is necessary to the development of the personality and without which the individual psyche remains incomplete. Wagner’s concept of love is not simply the conventional Romantic one: rather, following Hegel and Feuerbach, he portrayed love as a necessity, a basic psychological need. In love, moreover, the individual found true freedom: only by surrendering selfish interests in love — as Siegfried and Brünnhilde learn to do — could one throw off the shackles of the ego. In his conviction that sexual love was the motivating force that drove human history, Wagner momentarily departed from Hegel, however, since for Hegel that driving force was spirit, or reason.

Wagner was clearly impressed by Hegel’s exposition of the master—slave relationship, since aspects of this occur in different forms throughout the Ring. According to Hegel’s scheme, the division of people into masters and servants occurs as one stage of the cycle of human relationships. The master is no more free than the slave: so long as the former fails to acknowledge the autonomous existence of the latter, he or she cannot achieve self-consciousness any more than can the slave. Marx identified the category of slave with the proletariat. The Ring, as I have already suggested, also contains a critique of production relations, of the destructive, alienating power of capital, and of exploitation and oppression in both industrial and social spheres. But for Wagner the role of slave was occupied essentially by woman. Erda is subjugated by Wotan, Sieglinde by Hunding, the young, unnamed woman in Siegmund’s narration by her kinsmen, Grimhilde by Alberich, Brünnhilde first by Siegfried disguised as Gunther, and then by Gunther himself.

The brutal oppression of women is one of the primary themes of the Ring, and if Wagner’s sympathy for their plight is clear, so too is his perception that the injustice and savagery perpetrated are no less damaging to the violators themselves.

And yet, as Corse tellingly suggests, Wagner’s critique of the ideology of domination, at least as regards women, is flawed. Locked as he is into a patriarchal view of social relations, Wagner invariably sees a woman’s love in terms of surrender and self-sacrifice; its value is ultimately that it enables man to achieve his full potential. The consequences of such a view for the outcome of the Ring are, as we shall see, considerable.

Subjecting the four operas of the Ring to a critical scrutiny from a Hegelian perspective, as does Sandra Corse, one realises just how central this philosopher’s body of thought was to writers and artists of the time. Thus one can point out how even apparently autonomous female characters in the Ring are subject to domination. Following Horkheimer and Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment), Corse suggests that “the historic casting of women in the role of creatures somehow more natural than males [it is the Rhinemaidens that are referred to here, and, by implication, Erda] is a move of dominance. … That is, the impulse to treat women as more natural creatures than men is also an impulse to dominate them by depriving them of the power of intellect, an impulse that Wagner, in spite of his glorification of such women as Brünnhilde, could not escape.”

Such a view cuts across the grain of traditional (and surely inadequate) interpretations of the Rhinemaidens as creatures whose virtue lies in their “innocent” nature, uncorrupted by the world of human society. It also challenges the more “progressive” view, which seemed to be in tune with our own times, that such nature spirits — Freia and the Norns might also be included here — represented a positive, healing force with which ordinary mortals, corrupted as they were by the evils of the world, would do well to get in touch. (In any case, there is nothing very innocent about the “natural” world of the first scene of Das Rheingold. Politics and culture are manifest, Corse reminds us: it is “a world in which women’s roles are already tied to nature and purity, and racism (in the form of Alberich — he is described as a toad, black, and pictured as insensitive) has already emerged.” Furthermore, Wotan has despoiled nature and instituted a world of contracts by breaking off a branch of the World Ash Tree, long before the action of the Ring starts.)

Corse argues that Wotan’s attitude towards Erda reflects “civilized” society’s instinctive fear of the older state of nature, represented by the matriarchal gods. Wotan’s fear of what Erda represents is revealed in his need to dominate her, while his peremptory treatment of her later (Siegfried, Act 3, scene 1) “seems to be in retaliation for his inability completely to dominate her”. The argument makes a lot of sense: the development of theories of bourgeois society (from Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and beyond) is the story of the imposition of legal restraints, embodied in a social contract, on to a state of free, unfettered, unregulated nature.

Where I would take issue with Corse, however, is in her supposition that Wotan’s behaviour “suggests how strongly Wagner rejects the possibility of matriarchal power”. On the contrary, it is surely clear that Wagner does not approve of Wotan’s behaviour. As the primary representative of a world tainted by power politics, Wotan emerges as the individual who most needs to acquire self-awareness. The Ring is an indictment of a society ruled by contractualism, legal constraints, property rights and hierarchies of power. It was not by Hegel, but by Feuerbach, Proudhon, Bakunin and Stirner that Wagner was chiefly influenced in his depiction of a world corrupted and ultimately destroyed by politics and by the institutionalization and bureaucratization of modern society. The values that Wotan and his regime introduced into the world are discredited and rejected in favour of those of the new order represented by Siegfried and Brünnhilde. I am ready to agree with Corse that Wagner was in places “caught in the very ideology of domination he attempts to criticize”. But I cannot see that his characterization of Wotan offers any endorsement of the god’s self-destructive, and world-destructive, behaviour: sympathy for his moral dilemmas, perhaps, but hardly approval.

In Die Walküre, the theme of mutual recognition finds its clearest presentation. The attraction between Siegmund and Sieglinde (traced in their exchange of glances; in Siegmund’s claiming of the sword, and finally in the realization of their kinship) represents a new spirit in the world. They are the originators of a new order, one in which oppression, domination and force are to give way to social relationships based on love, mutual recognition and growing self-awareness. Hegel’s master—slave relationship is again relevant here. Sieglinde, representative of womankind generally, is forced into the role of domestic and sexual slavery. But, as Corse points out: “this is not without its advantages: for Hegel, it is the slave, not the lord, who eventually wins self-consciousness.”

In Siegfried, we follow the development of the naive, Rousseau-like child of nature to fully self-conscious individual — though even then, the “hero” needs his relationship with Brünnhilde to bring his consciousness to maturity.

In Gotterdämmerung, Siegfried enters the social world “to test his new self-consciousness” — a move which Hegel believed necessary, since “man’s moral nature is developed only in society”.

But the experiment, as we know, ends in catastrophe. Corse has some interesting perspectives on the ending, however. Noting that “the rising self-consciousness of the hero and the triumph of love seem to be rescinded in the last scenes”, she takes issue with the notion that the Ring depicts a cyclical view of history, one in which “we never learn anything and are doomed to repeat the past”. Drawing on Hegel’s concept of history, she believes that Wagner shows in the Ring that “history is the series of events that happen to individuals in the inevitable progress of love in the world, and individuals both cause and are transformed by these events. The ending of Gotterdämmerung suggests not redemption so much as the end of one stage of the progress of love and the beginning of the next”.

But for Corse, “Brünnhilde and Siegfried seem simply to fail at the end of Gotterdämmerung; the new consciousness they are supposed to represent is unconvincing after all”. Much of her dissatisfaction with the conclusion stems from her perception of the different treatment accorded Siegfried and Brünnhilde. He, denied any real humanity, “remains a wooden god, representing the deification of the male in our culture”, while she achieves the new consciousness only in an act of self-annihilation. Self-annihilation is, of course, for Wagner a positive act, but Corse is no doubt right to discern, behind the glorification of womanhood, the “patterns of sexist domination” which Wagner, true to his era, was unable to escape. For all his absorption of Hegel and Feuerbach, ultimately “any concept of real equality escapes him because he insists on seeing women as naturally passive and self-sacrificing and men as naturally strong and active”.

In discussing Hegel’s influence on Wagner and the Ring, profound as it obviously was — one needs to bear in mind a number of differences between their outlooks. Wagner’s attitude to the state, for example, is remarkably close to Marx’s critique of Hegel. For Hegel, the state was the highest expression of human freedom, to which the fully self-realized individual necessarily owed allegiance. For Wagner, as for Marx, the state was “the most unnatural association of individuals” and its ultimate demise an essential condition for the utopia of the future.

For Hegel, too, private property and the institution of marriage were central to the stability of society and the freedom of the individual. For Wagner, they represented shackles that destroyed the happiness and freedom of men and women alike; both are anathematized in the Ring.

To summarise, then. The influence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, ascetic and pessimistic, on the Ring is important, but not — as some would still have us believe — the whole story. There is also the life-affirming humanism of Feuerbach — in some ways a polar opposite — not to mention the inescapable influence of Hegel himself, to some extent filtered through Feuerbach. In addition there are the leading radicals, socialists and anarchists of the day — Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin, Stirner — for the Ring is, among other things, a political allegory, condemning oppression and exploitation, and enacting the global catastrophe to which they lead. The Ring was intended by its creator to provide both a warning and a taste of the utopia which the human race was capable of obtaining.

Sources

Arblaster, Anthony. Viva la Libertà. Politics in Opera (London and New York, 1992), p. 163.

Bermbach, Udo. “The Destruction of Institutions. Thoughts on the Political Content of Wagner’s Ring,” Bayreuth Festival Programme III (Die Walküre), 1988, p. 128.

Corse, Sandra. Wagner and the New Consciousness. Language and Love in the ‘Ring’ (Cranbury, NJ, 1990).

Feuerbach, Ludwig. Das Wesen des Christenthums, eds. Wilhelm Bolin and Friedrich Jodl (Stuttgart, 1903). Eng. trans. George Eliot [Marian Evans] (London, 1853, R/1957).

—. “Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft,” ed. Erich Thies (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), vol. III, pp. 247–322. Eng. trans. Manfred Vogel as Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Indianapolis, 1986).

—. Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit, ed. Erich Thies (Frankfurt am Main, 1975). Eng. trans. James A. Massey (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980).

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1952). Eng. trans. J.B. Baillie (London, 2/1931).

Pecht, Friedrich. Aus meiner Zeit (Munich, 1894), vol. I, pp. 293–4.

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. Qu’est-ce que la Proprété ? (Paris, 1840). Eng. trans. in Social Reformers, ed. Donald 0. Wagner (New York, 1949).

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. Arthur Hübscher, 2 vols (Wiesbaden, 1988). Eng. trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York, 1969).

Shaw, George Bernard. The Perfect Wagnerite. A Commentary on the Ring of the Niblungs (London, 1898), reprinted in Shaw’s Music, ed. Dan H. Laurence, 3 vols (London, 1989), vol. III, p. 408,545.

Wagner, Richard. Mein Leben, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin (Munich, 1976). Eng. trans. Andrew Gray (Cambridge, 1983).

—. Letter to August Mickel of 25/26 January 1854. Eng. trans. in Selected Letters of Richard Wagner; eds. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London, 1987), pp. 300–313.

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