A widely held stereotype sees the Romantic artist as a vessel of divine and largely uncontrolled inspiration. But Robert Schumann (1810–56) – an ardent Romantic in so many other ways–pursued an almost eerily systematic path in channeling his creativity. One by one, he conquered the important genres of instrumental and vocal music of his day. These ranged from the piano character piece in the 1830s, often grouped in large cycles, to songs, again grouped into cycles or collections, to symphonies, chamber music, and secular oratorio during the early 1840s, all of which gave him confidence in his last years to try his hand at opera and sacred music. During an unusually rich creative career, which lasted more than twenty-five years from the late 1820s to 1854, Schumann, at three different times and always at crucial crossroads, took up the composition of Lieder. The first of these occurred during the years 1827–28 and coincides with his first significant attempts at composing. The second dates from 1840 and overlaps with a period of crisis, both personal and professional, from which he emerged victorious and strengthened. The last came after 1847 when he attempted to renew himself as an artist in the face of demons both within and without; while the former doubtless will elude historical exactitude, the latter were egged on by the political turmoil that swept all of Europe in the late 1840s. As will be seen, there are specific reasons why the Lied, and not some other musical genre, became the catalyst for self-discovery, salvation, and renewal at each of these junctures.

Origins and forerunners of song cycles probably cannot be determined with any finality. Cycles and circles predate history and continue to permeate our lives in an unbroken tradition: seasonal rites and holidays, gathering around a fire, round table discussions, circular dances, ecological circles of life, wedding rings, halos … Even within our comparatively brief musical history, examples of cyclic forms abound, from cyclic Masses and madrigal cycles to cyclic symphonies and record albums. Song cycles are yet another example in an ancient history of cyclic art forms mirroring patterns in our lives. As the nineteenth century approached, however, cyclic forms in all the arts acquired greater significance, blossoming primarily in Germany after the turn of the century into the quintessentially Romantic song cycle, markedly different in style and structure from earlier cycles. Why Germany, why the nineteenth century, and why the Romantic song cycle require explanation: they were not mere coincidence.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, primary sponsorship for composers began to shift from aristocratic classes to ambitious upper middle classes, who displayed their acquisition of culture in their piano parlors, creating an almost insatiable market for songs. Songs that combined bourgeois pleasures with at least the appearance of high art were in particular demand. As the market grew, so of course did the need for composers to distinguish their songs from the rest, prompting ever more fanciful titles. Terms now associated with song cycles arose haphazardly out of vague associations, intentions, and meanings: whimsical titles such as Liederkreis (Lied-circle), Blumenkranz (Flower-wreath), Liederroman (Lied-novel), or Liedercyklus (Lied-cycle) sometimes indicated something new in the music, but sometimes did not, and a fair number of cycles held no characterizing title at all.

Heroism is, at best, a dubious quality. We admire heroes because they embody all that we consider most admirable in ourselves. Heroes are possessed of an excess of human energy, which has a propitious effect on the world around them. They display greater courage than regular people do, they know what they want and are fearless in achieving it. Through their exploits we glimpse, however briefly, images of human perfection and, depending on our beliefs, of something divine. But heroes are not easy to live with. The moment we try to incorporate heroism into our everyday lives, we play down whatever is individual about it and lay stress on its social virtues. Community newspapers encourage readers to nominate as “local heroes” those whose selfless labors are a benefit to the community. We designate as heroes people who help us, set us good examples, and save us from our worst selves. But, as Emerson put it, “the heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.” The heroic in our mundane world can be positively oppressive, especially when it claims authority over us. Our leaders may conceive of themselves as heroes, but the moment they do so, we find ourselves obliged to deny them. We hem them in with bureaucratic limitations and reduce them to our own size or smaller by insisting that they are models of indecision and inefficiency.

AN ANTI-HEROIC AGE

The age in which Richard Wagner grew up had little time for heroes. After the turmoil of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe entered upon an uneasy and somnolent peace. During the period of “Restoration” that followed the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, royalist governments attempted to return to the pre-revolutionary status quo, so there was little encouragement of critical and progressive thinking among artists, academics, or political radicals. In the German Confederation especially, curbs on freedom of speech were imposed by techniques prefiguring the modern police-state and applied by ever-expanding, impersonal bureaucracies. Through the Carlsbad decrees of 1819, freedom of the press was suspended, universities placed under rigorous state supervision, and political protest banned. Although these proscriptions were not applied uniformly and prison sentences were not always harsh, whoever challenged public authority did so at their peril. But this was not the worst of times. The post-war economic boom resulted in an expanded middle class and improved standards of living, so for those who enjoyed a modicum of prosperity, life was not unpleasant. Germans turned to the cultivation of their personal and professional lives, and their culture of this time, known to us as “Biedermeier,” expressed itself in modest, sentimental artistic forms that celebrated the family and cozy domesticity and avoided the uglier aspects of life. In Biedermeier art, the city was represented as an extension of the pastoral world, not as an arena for the incipient industrial revolution.

Richard Wagner is still with us and it is surprising that he is. For some decades after his death, the theatre developed along lines suggested by his theatrical and dramatic practice and theory, but as the forms and functions of theatre changed in the early decades of the twentieth century, the aesthetic legitimacy of his work was challenged. Not only did the romantic–realistic style in which the music-dramas were conceived become archaic, but the heroic atmosphere and ethos of his work grew increasingly suspect. The notion of heroism as a formative agent in public life, always a questionable assumption, has been more discredited in the latter half of the twentieth century than perhaps at any other time in history. The aphorism of Brecht's Galileo, “Unhappy the land where heroes are needed,” must surely stand as one of our defining mottoes since World War II. But Wagner, for all his championing of the hero, did not disappear. A few years after the defeat of Germany, the music-dramas were reinstated in the international and German operatic repertoire, and although subsequent generations have continued to contest their centrality to German culture, they are as popular as they have ever been. Even smaller European opera-houses now regularly stage the Ring and at the Bayreuth Festival applications for tickets, we are told, outweigh availability by a factor of about eight to one. Wagner, it appears, will be with us for several decades to come, probably longer.

LAST DRAMAS

If old age is marked by a desire for death as a relief from the rigors of life, then Wagner started aging when he was still quite young, at forty-one, after his first reading of Schopenhauer. Through Schopenhauer he learnt that survival in an antagonistic world comes most effectively through resigned acceptance, which led him to a sensation of profound peace which seemed to cancel his self. As he wrote to Liszt:

Wagner still had twenty-nine years to live and while his letters and personal writings indicate a continuing yearning for death, he spent most of his time living very much in the world, as the contentious, intensely ambitious, cantankerous, visionary individual he had always been. The sensibility of his music-dramas did, however, begin to shift. The first sign of this came when he broke off composition on the Ring in 1857.

For Wagner, the arts had a heroic purpose. His belief in theatre and music as agencies that allow us to free ourselves from the circumscriptive and corrupting conditions of everyday living was the overriding intellectual preoccupation of his life and the central concern of his major theoretical and critical writings. His vision of theatre's power to transform audiences grew from his impatience with the all-prevailing mediocrity he discovered in the smaller German opera companies where he began his career as a conductor in the 1830s. It was intensified by his stay in Paris, when he came to the conclusion that the most influential theatre in Europe was dominated by routine, egotistical display, shallowness, and indifference to artistic worth. What he saw in Paris was theatre devoted solely to commercial gain; what he came to envision was theatre released from all financial obligation, a place where individuals could achieve freedom by seeing works that led them to understand how they are part of a natural community, a community of the folk. This conception of theatre germinated during his years in Dresden and came to maturity in the great essays written during his first years of exile in Switzerland.

THEATRE AND FREEDOM

Wagner's critique of contemporary opera underwent few modifications in his lifetime. In his earliest essays, we find him complaining that artists have lost touch with their public, that no one knows how to give life to the voice of the folk on stage, and that librettists cannot instill their works with a poetry that provides the dramatic figures with an “organic core of life.”

THE RING AND TRAGEDY

There was no doubt in Wagner's mind that the Ring was a tragedy. While he was writing the poem, he described it as “a tragedy of the most shattering effectiveness.” There is abundant evidence that he thought of the Festival of Dionysus as a model, and both the Oedipus myth and the Oresteia have been mined for parallels. More generally, his correspondence and Cosima's diaries are packed with references to the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, Calderón, Schiller, and other tragic writers, in contexts indicating that he considered himself to be among their company. Modern critics have been less certain. George Steiner, in his search for symptoms of the “death of tragedy,” fastens on Götterdämmerung as one of those dramas in which the uncompromising forces that destroy human freedom are palliated by “the apotheosis of redemption,” while Lloyd-Jones, influenced by Steiner, argues that “in the Ring in general we find something profoundly alien to the spirit of an ancient tragedy,” citing Wagner's belief in the essential goodness of humanity as the source of this. Whether belief in human goodness and the powers of redemption preclude tragedy is a matter for debate – after all, the Oresteia, that touchstone of Greek tragedy, finishes with a more explicitly redemptive end than the Ring – but the precise nature of the tragedy of the Ring does remain in doubt. This is because in it different modes of tragedy that imply differing and potentially incompatible views of the human condition are fused.

All Wagner's heroes are, to a greater or lesser degree, travelers. They come from outside society and are surrounded with an aura that suggests they possess special knowledge and exercise unusual powers. Those who encounter the heroic stranger find his presence either invigorating, as through him they grow more intensely aware of their own inner life, or disquieting, as he disrupts their settled ways. Whatever wonder or anxiety the hero arouses, few can open themselves to him unconditionally, and he must eventually leave the world because it is incompatible with him. His death is not, however, an unmitigated defeat, because as with the epic hero of myth, it intensifies rather than cancels the potency of his heroic aura. Nevertheless, in Wagner, the glory is rarely the hero's alone, for it is often shared by a woman who dies with and for him, and, by her very act of self-sacrifice, she not only vindicates his heroic stature, but evinces her own mode of heroism, based upon pure altruism. In each case where that altruism prevails, it embodies values superior to those for which the male hero stands.

This progress of the hero through Wagner's music-dramas reflects, in most instances, his own emotional and artistic concerns and crises. Indeed, his work was unique in his time, first because it employed the stage as a means of representing personal crisis, secondly because none of his stage-works was ever written on commission, all were written out of personal need.