WAGNER'S 'SIEGFRIED': ITS DRAMA, ITS HISTORY, AND ITS MUSIC

Siegfried is the turning point in Wagner's Ring--the juncture at which the dramatic norms and musical processes of the earlier parts of the cycle give way to the new levels of dramatic meaning and the new musical complexities of the later parts. Perhaps the most extraordinary paradox of the work is that its pivotal nature extends to virtually every aspect of both its compositional history and its dramatic and musical construction. In the area of drama, it completes the transition, initiated in Die Walkure, from the world of Wotan and the gods to that of Siegfried the hero, and it articulates the establishment of the values of the latter in place of those of the former. At the same time it poses the singular problem of working a comedy, Siegfried, into the structure of a larger work, the Ring, which is a tragedy. Historically, it was the critical work upon which the completion or non-completion of the cycle depended. And, with regard to the music, the formal organization of acts into poetic-musical periods, which worked so well and so consistently in Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, begins to disintegrate in Acts I and II of Siegfried; and an entirely new principle of musical structure comes to the fore in Act III.;Chapter II traces Wagner's difficulties in setting the dramatic text to music. Siegfried has perhaps the most complex compositional history of any work in the nineteenth century--a history supported by a wealth of primary sources and documents, many of which have never appeared in English, and many of which have long been out of print, even in German. Since the work's history sheds light on the musical problems of its first and second acts, and on the striking structural differences between these acts and the third, consideration of its origins is perhaps more essential than it would be in works having a less idiosyncratic compositional history and a more consistent musical language.;The final chapter is concerned with the music of Siegfried--particularly its tonal and formal structure. Siegfried, like the Ring as a whole, employs four different principles of tonality: an expanded version of classical eighteenth-century tonality, and principles designated as associative, expressive, and directional tonality. Of the four, associative tonality--the consistent use of a key in conjunction with a dramatic site, object, or symbol--is especially determinant for the large-scale tonal organization of the opera. It is the associative principle that ties Siegfried to the tonal structure of the Ring; and it is the same principle, along with the expressive and directional ones, that is used to make the tonal structure of the opera a musical analogue of its dramatic structure.;The present study is divided into three chapters--one on the drama of Siegfried, one on its history, and one on its music. The central thesis of Chapter I is that Siegfried is constructed in accordance with the classical principles of comedy, the Ring with those of tragedy. Within Siegfried itself there are two lines of dramatic action--the comic one of its hero's overcoming a series of obstacles and joining Brunnhilde in triumph at the end, and the tragic one of Wotan's willing abdication of power. Such a view not only connects Siegfried to a broader literary tradition, but also makes possible a detailed analysis of its dramatic structure according to existing theories of comedy. The dramatic structure of the opera is further explicated by an examination of Wagner's literary sources--the German stories about Siegfried and the Scandinavian mythology--and shows how Wagner extracted elements of each to forge a single coherent story.