The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi

Abstract

There has been no lack of scholarly attention lavished on Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. And yet, commentary on the work has usually been geared towards a more general readership, and an enlightened, critical examination of Wagner has come about late and with resistance, especially on the part of musicologists. Scholarship on the Ring thus tends to fall between two stools: neither is it in the vanguard of vitally new research, nor does it quite enjoy the coherence of a body of scholarship that has won an assured place in the musicological canon. Albeit the latest in a long line of multi-author volumes on Wagner’s magnum opus, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is a spirited response to the challenge of summarizing historical and ongoing commentary on the work for a broad readership. The Companion is edited by Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi, both of whom have already made prolific contributions to Wagner studies, and contains contributions by fifteen scholars and critics from various disciplines. Berry and Vazsonyi share authorship of the introduction, each writing alternate sections. As they explain, ‘rather than try to conceal our differences, here was the place to bring them into the open’ (p. 2). This strategy sets the tone for the volume as a whole: namely, the sheer variety of approaches jostling together. Thereafter the volume divides into a sequence of four parts, titled respectively ‘Myth’, ‘Aesthetics’, ‘Interpretations’, and ‘Impact’. Part I opens with Jason Geary on ‘Greek Tragedy and Myth’, an accessible consideration of the topic that also places Wagner’s reception of the Greeks in the context of nineteenth-century German philhellenism. The historian Stefan Arvidsson unpacks the broader, ideological meanings of ‘mythology’ in chapter 2 (‘Wagner and the Rise of Modern Mythology’). Both Geary and Arvidsson foreground Wagner’s so-called ‘Zurich writings’ as an interpretative entry point to the Ring, an emphasis continued in Part II (‘Aesthetics’).