Of the three genres into which this book is divided, epic is possibly the most difficult to define. Perhaps more than drama and certainly more than lyric, the meaning of the word “epic” has been continually loosened by everyday speech, especially the kind of hyperbolic speech that tends to surround the film, television, and publishing industries. Every time we use epic to describe a summer blockbuster; every time we apply it to the latest mini-series; every time a story beyond two hundred pages turns out to be epic, it becomes that much harder to narrow our notion of this genre down to something more intellectually specific. It is not necessarily the case that these popular idioms do not deserve the epithet epic; genres do grow and change. But it seems we have all but forgotten that this term is something more than just a synonym for “really big.” Beyond the grander notions of its heroes and its length, we have conveniently forgotten epic's less splendid characteristics: its wordy lists, meandering plots, and attention not just to the great things in life but also the small – minute descriptions of basics like food preparation, clothing, and other domestic affairs. This is not only an aesthetic observation. Epics like the Odyssey and the Bible were/are not merely entertaining narratives about a certain group of characters, but cultural and religious guides for their readers and listeners.

The journey of lyrical self-discovery that Siegfried embarks upon in his eponymous opera is also Wagner's own journey of self-discovery. But since music ostensibly lacks a first-person singular voice, as a composer Wagner has to be more indirect than the lyric poet who can simply say “I.” Through this simple grammatical act, literary poets can imply that both they and their characters are simultaneously the origins of the lines we read or hear. Yet, as a composer specifically of vocal music, Wagner was able to obtain some of this directness through the self-expressive advantage he had over composers of, say, absolute music. Like the lyric poet, his characters can at least sing “I.” And perhaps more so than in any other opera in the Ring, when characters in Siegfried say “I” it is Wagner we hear ventriloquizing through them, trying to express and exorcise the demons that haunted him concerning his own biological origins and his art; specifically, those bourgeois Jewish demons that tormented him concerning his father's true identity.

WHO SPEAKS IN LYRIC POETRY?

There are two primary dangers associated with very traditional readings of lyric as autobiography and, in turn, the application of such readings to opera. The first danger is in identifying the character in a lyrical work too closely with its creator. The second is in overlooking the national dimension of lyric poetry.

Like other nineteenth-century artists, but perhaps especially novelists, Wagner participated in the general trend of rejuvenating his chosen medium by infusing it with epic. This meant infusing not only his libretto but also his music with epic, a claim that few scholars have taken seriously. Previous studies of narrative in Wagner's operas have tended to stop short of discussing the ways in which his most famous musical technique, the so-called leitmotif technique, might be connected with his interest in epic. Instead, they have focused their narrative analyses almost solely on the Ring's libretto. But as Dahlhaus and Deathridge point out (but do not pursue) in The New Grove Wagner, “One might well speak of the birth of the leitmotif technique out of the dialectic of the epic element in Wagner's drama.” Indeed, beyond just finding a causal link between epic and music in Wagner, focusing on the epic properties of Wagner's leitmotifs in greater detail may also help us to arrive at a fuller understanding of the Ring's use of Greek epic forms to help define German national identity. Specifically, the way in which Wagner's emulation of epic leads him to compress music so tightly as to reduce its temporal dimension and make it seem almost spatial. With these spatialized and easily memorized leitmotifs, Wagner tries to teach his German audience what they are and what they should be: a people that values love above power.

The following list contains the names and works (whenever possible) of those classical scholars one can prove, by consulting his writings or his conversations, that Wagner knew personally. Because of the prominent role they played in his thinking about the Greeks, some of these authors' entries are longer than others – for example, Nietzsche's entry is the longest.

Apel, Johann August. From his youth onward Wagner knew and respected Johann August Apel, the father of his boyhood friend, Theodor Apel. The senior Apel's contribution to Wagner's understanding of the Greeks included both creative and scholarly works. On the scholarly side, Wagner studied Apel's book on Greek poetic meter, Metrik, and on the more creative side, the poet in Wagner was influenced by Apel's poetic output, especially Polyïdos and Die Aitolier. In his “Autobiographical Sketch” Wagner even goes so far as to say that it was through his acquaintance with these and similar poetic works by Apel that he felt “urged” to “sketch out tragedies on the models of the Greeks.” Wagner considered Apel “the master of metrical forms and reviver of Greek verse forms.”

Curtius, Ernst and Wolfgang Helbig. These two men were archaeologists Wagner knew briefly while in Rome. While very little can be said about Wagner's interactions with Curtius and Hebig, the little that can be said gives one some insight into what Wagner thought about archaeology.

The “Introduction” to this book lists the names of all the ancient authors that I have been able to prove that Wagner mentioned in writing or conversation. This appendix, however, does not contain all of those names because I have limited myself here to only those authors whose books Wagner mentions by name. The two most important authors missing from this appendix are Pindar and Hesiod because, at least so far as I have been able to discover, Wagner never mentions any specific titles by these authors. But since these two poets receive ample treatment in the body of this book, I do not consider this a great drawback. At any rate, I think we can be certain that Wagner read both of these authors but uncertain as to what precisely he read. As for the authors of other primary sources, some of their works are mentioned so often by Wagner that to cite each instance would make the scaffolding bigger than the building, so to speak. So I have tried to include what I think are the most significant mentions and have footnoted these. The last thing to say about Wagner's primary sources from antiquity concerns his readings of Roman literature. One of the more interesting things to point out in this regard is not what the list contains but what it leaves out. Indeed, Wagner mentions few Roman works by name, and he tends not to regard these works with much esteem.

The influences of Greek epic, lyric, and drama can be found both in the whole and the individual parts of the Ring cycle. Wagner not only patterned each particular opera after a particular genre, he also wove the threads of each genre throughout the whole of the cycle. This is most clearly the case with his use of epic. To many a Wagner scholar and Wagner fan alike, the whole of the Ring seems epic in scope. So much so, that Herbert Lindenberger in his study of operatic excess, Opera: The Extravagant Art, claims, “No work in any art form of the last two centuries, with the exception of a few sprawling novels and films, invites the term epic as readily as the Ring.” For Lindenberger as for others, the epic nature of the Ring resides in its monumentalism as measured from multiple perspectives: time (length of time to plan, write, and perform), size (numbers of performers and space needed), and ideas (claims to universality of message and the greatness of its creator). All of these measurements certainly invite accolades of epic grandeur for the Ring. Further inspired by this Wagnerian monumentalism, we might also be tempted to call the Ring an epic because of the cosmic reach of its plot.

Because both Hegel and Wagner believed that epic relies on meaningfully recognizable representations of reality, they further believed that this creates serious problems for any modern trying to read, let alone revive, an ancient epic. Demonstrably, the references to Nordic mythology in one of Wagner's central epic sources, the Nibelungenlied, were not immediately relevant, understandable, and/or meaningful to many of his listeners. It was almost certainly the case that when Wagner first began writing the Ring, as far as his German audience was concerned, its characters and stories came from “a misty Nordic world about which it knew nothing and cared even less.” In his effort to influence German national identity through the use of this “misty Nordic” epic, Wagner therefore had to find a way to make it vital to his audience. Nineteenth-century Germany did not inhabit the same factual and spiritual reality described in the Norse sagas, myths, and epics. It neither worshiped the same gods nor upheld the same laws and customs. As Hegel caustically notes of the Nibelungenlied, any attempt to use its pagan Germanic myths, gods, and cultural references to depict reality for a nineteenth-century audience would have been an absurd and childish endeavor. The links between nineteenth-century Germans and their primeval Germanic myths had long been severed:

To be able to understand the relationship between Wagner and the Greeks one must be conversant with those primary sources that Wagner read and re-read throughout his life. This seems obvious. But what does not seem so obvious, at least given the way that previous authors have approached this topic, is that one should also be conversant with the ways in which Wagner's understanding of the Greeks was influenced by secondary scholarship and scholars. And yet it is this academic research that sometimes, quite surprisingly, illuminates the murk of Wagner's prose and the peaks of his music. In fact I would argue that, as with all other modes of research, one can never really speak of the Greeks per se, much less Wagner and the Greeks, no matter how much scholars, Semele-like, may desire to gaze upon their subjects unadorned. Because even scholarship is political, one must recognize that Wagner's Grecocentrism was part of his own ideological bent as well as a larger national trend, a particular manifestation of the nineteenth-century German Zeitgeist. The way in which Wagner and his compatriots chose to dress up the Greeks says as much or more about them and about Germany as it does about Greece. But what does it say?

In his acute but all too brief appraisal of such philhellenism John Deathridge summarizes how and why Wagner and like-minded Germans used the Greeks: “from the start of his career Wagner was in thrall to the idea of the Greeks as the pristine source of a lost culture – an ideal of fundamental origins projected onto the utopian future of a society encumbered by alienated living and a lack of spiritual freedom.”

Since opera's conception in Renaissance Italy, scholars and composers alike have been asking what can be gained by thinking of drama as its primary model, medium, and literary paradigm. But both in the distant and the more recent past few thinkers have ventured to wonder what opera might gain through its use of lyric. In fact, the most famous formers and reformers of opera have, sometimes quite vociferously, tried to extirpate lyric from opera. Richard Wagner was perhaps the loudest. Looking back at the birth of opera as already a dramatic failure in need of lyrical pruning, Wagner saw the Italian effort to create opera by reviving Greek tragedy as little more than the grafting of church music onto Senecan drama: “Italian Opera is the singular miscarriage of an academic fad, according to which, if one took a versified dialogue modeled more or less on Seneca, and simply got it psalm-sung as one does with the Church-litanies, it was believed one would find oneself on the high road to restoring Antique Tragedy, provided one also arranged for due interruption by choral chants and ballet-dances.” It was such lyrical displays as these “choral chants and ballet-dances” that Wagner sought to root out of opera, while simultaneously raising dialogue, hitherto relegated to the mutterings of recitative, to a higher level of musical sophistication and complexity.

The basic thesis of this book is that each opera in Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen) represents a particular phase in the cultural evolution of a mythic world modeled in part upon the ancient Greek world. This thesis is immediately supported by two claims that Wagner made about the Ring in a letter to his friend, August Röckel, on August 23, 1856. The first is that in the Ring Wagner claims he intended to construct “a Hellenistically optimistic world [eine hellenistisch-optimistische Welt] for myself which I held to be entirely realizable if only people wished it to exist.” This world he says he constructed by relying upon his intellectual “conceptions.” Wagner's second claim is that, “instead of a single phase in the world's evolution, what I had glimpsed [in the Ring] was the essence of the world itself in all its conceivable phases.” Wagner attributes this second claim not to his intellectual conceptions but his artistic “intuitions.” Thus we have the notion of a Greek model in the first claim and cultural evolution in the second. But because Wagner attributes the second claim to intuition more than intellect, he favors that one. And yet, upon closer examination, it appears that the only real difference between the two claims is chronological. The intellectual idea is one Wagner intended to carry out before he completed the Ring, and the artistic idea is one he began to see only after he had been working on the Ring and began to see where it was going.

Not surprisingly, the list of secondary authors that one can prove Wagner knew personally is shorter than the list of those secondary authors that he knew only by reputation or by reading their work. Several of the scholars in this second category merit special attention because (1) their works could be found both in Wagner's Dresden library and his Wahnfried library, and (2) they are mentioned often by Cosima in her diaries and/or by Wagner in his own writings. The two most important authors in this respect are Johann Gustav Droysen and Karl Otfried Müller and so I will dwell at length on them and their work, especially Müller's Dorians (Die Dorier), Droysen's History of Hellenism (Geschichte des Hellenismus), and his translation of Aeschylus. In general, though, it is interesting to note that two of these works focus neither on Athens at its most fertile historical moment nor on its most important civic art, tragedy. Instead, Droysen's Hellenism focuses on Athens after its classical period, while Müller's Dorians focuses on that culture that, in so many ways, stood against all that Athens stood for. As I argue throughout this book (but especially in the sections on Götterdämmerung), Wagner was always intrigued by destruction and doom (Untergang) and by what a thing was not rather than what it was.

The difficulty in defining epic arises in part through constant and cavalier application of the term without giving due consideration to form or content. The difficulty in defining lyric arises more from our theoretical clumsiness at grasping this highly elastic and slippery genre. But the difficulty in defining drama arises not from a lack of thought or theoretical dexterity. The problem with defining drama is that there is almost an infinity of things that seem to deserve or at least desire and aspire to the name drama. This problem is in turn compounded by the innumerable theories about what drama is or is not and what it should or should not do. The category of “performance” and “performance studies” is only the latest attempt to circumscribe this ever-expanding theatrical and theoretical universe. Even just limiting ourselves to Hegel's and Wagner's theories of drama still presents us with a daunting task. To make this task more manageable, my solution throughout these final four chapters will be to concentrate on just a few of the most important convergences and divergences between Wagner's and Hegel's dramatic theories. These areas include the use of drama as a civic institution, the roles that tragedy and comedy play within this civic context, and the evolution and eventual de-evolution of drama out of and back into its epic and lyric components.

It is through Wagner's dual perspective on the past and the future that we recognize how his utopian philosophy was firmly rooted, as Mann reminds us, in the mythological. This kind of progressive backward glance is the essence of Wagner's political aestheticization of the Greeks. To requote Deathridge: the Greeks were, for Wagner, “the pristine source of a lost culture – an ideal of fundamental origins projected onto the utopian future of a society encumbered by alienated living and a lack of spiritual freedom.” But in Siegfried and in his discussions of lyric in general and Greek lyric in particular, Wagner is more interested in a utopian future than a mythological past. He tends to regard lyric as a stop along the way to poetry's highest evolutionary goal, drama, particularly drama in the form of tragedy. His description of lyric and drama in “The Art-Work of the Future” is emblematic of this visionary perspective. Lyric is seen as “primal,” while drama is lyric's “later, more conscious, loftiest completion.” This forward-looking tendency is further strengthened by the historical fact that Wagner wrote the libretto for his lyric opera, Siegfried (originally Der junge Siegfried), after he wrote Götterdämmerung (originally Siegfrieds Tod). In writing Siegfried, therefore, Wagner already knew the dramatic finish to his lyric hero's life and so, to some extent, his vision of Siegfried's future dramatic actions determine Wagner's representation of Siegfried's lyrical past.