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This literary and critical approach to Wagner's Ring provides an original interpretation of the Ring tetralogy and challenges the standard political analyses of the work. The Ring is examined in the tradition of the romantic drama as a reworking of Greek tragedy as theoretically expressed in the ...

This literary and critical approach to Wagner's Ring provides an original interpretation of the Ring tetralogy and challenges the standard political analyses of the work. The Ring is examined in the tradition of the romantic drama as a reworking of Greek tragedy as theoretically expressed in the second part of Oper und Drama. In the Ring, using myth as a metaphor for history presents a paradoxical world. The innertextual reflection that Wotan performs in his monologue causes the Ring to self-destruct from within. He actually dismantles or deconstructs the text of the Ring. The doom of the gods happens because the Ring has undermined, unworked and dismantled its system of significtion.

Few musical works loom as large in Western culture as Richard Wagner's four-part Ring of the Nibelung. In Finding an Ending, two eminent philosophers, Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, offer an illuminating look at this greatest of Wagner's achievements, focusing on its far-reaching and subtle ...

Few musical works loom as large in Western culture as Richard Wagner's four-part Ring of the Nibelung. In Finding an Ending, two eminent philosophers, Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, offer an illuminating look at this greatest of Wagner's achievements, focusing on its far-reaching and subtle exploration of problems of meanings and endings in this life and world. Kitcher and Schacht plunge the reader into the heart of Wagner's Ring, drawing out the philosophical and human significance of the text and the music. They show how different forms of love, freedom, heroism, authority, and judgment are explored and tested as it unfolds. As they journey across its sweeping musical-dramatic landscape, Kitcher and Schacht lead us to the central concern of the Ring--the problem of endowing life with genuine significance that can be enhanced rather than negated by its ending, if the right sort of ending can be found. The drama originates in Wotan's quest for a transformation of the primordial state of things into a world in which life can be lived more meaningfully. The authors trace the evolution of Wotan's efforts, the intricate problems he confronts, and his failures and defeats. But while the problem Wotan poses for himself proves to be insoluble as he conceives of it, they suggest that his very efforts and failures set the stage for the transformation of his problem, and for the only sort of resolution of it that may be humanly possible--to which it is not Siegfried but rather Brunnhilde who shows the way. The Ring's ending, with its passing of the gods above and destruction of the world below, might seem to be devastating; but Kitcher and Schacht see a kind of meaning in and through the ending revealed to us that is profoundly affirmative, and that has perhaps never been so powerfully and so beautifully expressed.

Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold is a milestone in the composer's output and in the history of music in general. It marked Wagner's return to operatic composition after a hiatus of five years, and signified his definitive break with earlier operatic conventions. It also represents a ...

Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold is a milestone in the composer's output and in the history of music in general. It marked Wagner's return to operatic composition after a hiatus of five years, and signified his definitive break with earlier operatic conventions. It also represents a reconsideration of the whole question of dramatic-musical form, and the role of tonality in articulating this form. Warren Darcy traces here the genesis of Das Rheingold through the various textual and musical sketches and drafts to the full score, and also develops a theoretical framework within which the opera may be meaningfully analyzed. Using Wagner's manuscripts as a point of departure, Darcy discusses the formal, harmonic, and linear structure of the work. In so doing, he challenges a number of contemporary views about the opera, esppecially those of Carl Dahlhaus.