The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs (Oxford World's Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

neo-medieval operas of the period, dealing with the themes of love, betrayal, and vengeance and ending with a
Liebestod
lifted straight from
Der fliegende Holländer
(
The Flying Dutchman
), which Wagner had composed in 1843.
Siegfrieds Tod
— later revised as
Götterdämmerung
, the fourth and final part of
Der Ring des Nibelungen
—is the section of the finished work most heavily indebted to the
Nibelungenlied
. Demonstrable borrowings include Siegfried’s belligerent arrival at Gunther’s court (Third Adventure), the oath that the hero swears in an attempt to clear his name (Fourteenth Adventure), the betrayal of his vulnerable spot (Tenth Adventure), and the whole sequence of events surrounding his murder at Hagen’s hands (Sixteenth Adventure). Conversely, the famous scene in which Prünhilt and Kriemhilt confront one another on the steps of the minster at Worms (Fourteenth Adventure) had already inspired the encounter between Elsa and Ortrud in front of Antwerp Cathedral in Act Two of
Lohengrin
(completed in 1848 and first staged under Liszt in Weimar in 1850).
Lohengrin
owes the core of its plot to the story of Loherangrin in Wolfram’s
Parzival
.
    The appeal of the poem, with its medieval trappings, began to wane as soon as Wagner started to develop anarchical leanings and turned to myth as an expression of necessary revolutionary change. He could not use history to invoke his vision of the future: myth alone could embody the cosmic clash between the forces of reaction and a more humane and enlightened regime. It was in order to excavate what he believed was the mythic substratum of all the available material that Wagner began to delve more deeply into the Scandinavian versions of the legend, versions which, in keeping with the scholarly thinking of his time, he regarded as more archaic and, hence, as more prototypically ‘German’ than the thirteenth-century
Nibelungenlied;
Wagner himself uses the word ‘urdeutsch’ in this context. The essential ‘Germanness’ of the Nibelung legend was one of the few constant factors in his attitude to the
Ring
, and one that derives ultimately from Fichte’s belief in the great German Revolution that would liberate the whole of humanity. In turn, this interest in Siegfried’s prehistory led Wagner to preface
Siegfrieds Tod
with
Der junge Siegfried
, recounting his mythical hero’s youthful adventures, and ultimately to add
Das Rheingold
and
Die Walküre
, describing in detail the gods’ corrupt rule and Wotan’s attempts to find a free and ‘purely human’ hero able to cleanse the world of the curse-laden ring. The four poems were completed by December 1852, the music not until November 1874. The cycle as a whole was first staged in Bayreuth, in the theatre that Wagner had had specially built for the work, in August 1876.
    The second—and related—reason for Wagner’s changing attitude to the
Nibelungenlied
stems from his increasing interest in the scholarly debates of the time: he read not only the primary MHG and Old Icelandic texts in translation, but also the writings of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805–71), Karl Lachmann, Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Ludwig Ettmüller (1802–77), Carl Wilhelm Göttling (1793–1869), and Franz Joseph Mone (1796–1871), many of whom sought to reconstruct a prototypical Nibelung myth inspired by the Romantic belief in the essential oneness of the surviving versions of the narrative. Echoing Lachmann and Jacob Grimm, Wagner now came to see Siegfried as a sun-god destroyed by the powers of darkness embodied in the Nibelungs, his death a part of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. If the gods’ rule had originally been consolidated by Siegfried’sdeath, those same gods were now to be superseded, a development bound up in part with Wagner’s reading of Hegel, and in part with his own increasing involvement in the revolutionary movements of 1848–9 and their disenchanting aftermath. The