Wagner's "Ring," an important phenomenon of the German drama tradition, is situated and examined alongside other major works of the canon. Wagner defines tragedy as a mythological drama. The theoretical foundation of the "Ring" is a complex dialectic of history and myth. By contrasting the "Ring" with the dramas of Schiller, Hebbel, Hofmannsthal, and Brecht different facets of Wagner's work are uniquely highlighted beyond theoretical generalizations or broad overviews. This series of comparisons offers fresh insight into the interrelationships of the "Ring" with the previous German drama...

Consisting of six studies that present hermeneutical analyses of Wagnerian dramas, this book discusses Wagner's mature single dramas from "Hollander" to "Parsifal" with reference to the concept of Romantic irony and the basic theoretical orientation of post-structuralism. Wagner is best known as a composer of mythological works, but these music-dramas contain basic problems that essentially contradict what is regarded as their mythological or legendary nature. They all self-referentially play out certain critical processes. Focusing on the very issue of interpretation, this work asks how...

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."...