Abstract
Arguably the most extensive in the history of musicology, the Wagner literature places perennial emphasis on the conception and symbolism of Wagner’s magnum opus, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Interpretations vary, encompassing social, political, anthropological, psychological, theological, and other approaches. The prevailing assumption is that Wagner provided no definitive evidence as to the meaning of the Ring. This study demonstrates that he did. While the extrinsic impulses that form the macrocosm of an artist’s collective influences remain relevant, the intrinsic microcosm of the artist’s aesthetic ideals merits greater attention. Given Wagner’s dual capacity as artist and thinker, there are grounds for inquiring further into this microcosm, especially in view of his polemic against entrenched attitudes toward art, in general, and operatic conventions, in particular. Wagner’s texts, the prose, the poetic, and the musical, abound in allegorical dualities that come down to a single principle: the dichotomy between surface and depth. Metaphor is the means by which all that Wagner advances in the abstract—in essays, program notes, letters, recollections—is given concrete form. A primary objective in this work is the reinterpretation of Wagner’s most far-reaching manifesto, the Ring, in the light of his intellectual and artistic (r)evolution between the 1840s and the 1870s. Wagner translates his aesthetic system into allegory; and the feminine element reigns supreme from first to last. Regardless of chronology, and widespread misconceptions, Wagner’s theory centers on an unvarying premise: music is the fons et origo of drama, at once a mother and a spouse to poetry. Accordingly, the semiotics of gender in the overarching conflict between outwardness and inwardness, which defines Wagner’s inherently romantic worldview, is a key point of consideration. It is identified in characters, concepts, objects, locales. Other aspects receiving close scrutiny include: Wagner’s sword metaphor, inextricably bound up with his breakthroughs in form; naturalistic, physiological, and other (dialectical) oppositions within the framework of depth and surface, such as sea-land, water-fire, forest-city, night-day, sound-light, ear-eye, emotion-intellect; incest through the lens of Wagner’s aesthetic insight into the myth of Oedipus; tropes associated with Beethoven, who, like Wotan and Hans Sachs, straddles the old and the new; and the musical rendering of origination in Das Rheingold and Tristan und Isolde, informed by two antithetical philosophical perspectives. Comprehensive contextualization of the Wagnerian aesthetic, grounded in transition and the transcendence of orthodoxy, has yet to be attained. To this end, Wagner’s knowledge and experience of philosophy are explored in depth, as are essential questions surrounding classicism and romanticism from both a historical and an ideological standpoint. Without venturing into the anachronistic, the final chapter concentrates on the intersection of three historically distinct yet conceptually related “realities,” linked by their affinity with infinitude and their immunity to the finitude of classical thought: Wagnerian dramaturgy, Absolute Idealism, and quantum theory. Ultimately, Wagner’s cognitive and creative paths and processes are retraced to music, language, literature, (meta)physics, theology, mysticism, in pursuit of epistemic and hermeneutic synthesis. A journey through art and philosophy, science and religion, this study exposes and expounds, to a degree hitherto unattempted, the metaphoric and metamorphic, but fundamentally musical, “Wagner manifesto.”