The evolution of Richard Wagner's epic operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) was a long and tortuous process, and the precise sequence of events which led the composer to embark upon such a vast undertaking is still unclear. The composition of the text took place between 1848 and 1853, when all four libretti were privately printed. The closing scene of the final opera, Götterdämmerung, was revised a number of times between 1856 and 1872. The names of the last two Ring operas, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, were probably not definitively settled until 1856.

Conception of the Ring

According to the composer's own account – as related in his autobiography Mein Leben – it was after the February Revolution that he began to sketch a play on the life of the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. While researching this work, he came to see Friedrich as "a historical rebirth of the old, pagan Siegfried".A Communication to My Friends (Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. IV, p. 359). Then, in the summer of 1848, he wrote the essay Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Saga (The Wibelungs: World History as Told in Saga), in which he noted some historical links (spurious, as it happens) between the Hohenstaufens and the legendary Nibelungs.See Guelphs and Ghibellines for the association of the term Waiblingen with the Hohenstaufens. This led him to consider Siegfried as a possible subject for a new opera, and by October 1848 the entire Ring cycle had been conceived.Wagner, Mein Leben

This rather straightforward account of the Rings origins, however, has been disputed by a number of authorities, who accuse Wagner of deliberately distorting the facts so as to bring them into harmony with his own private version of history. The actual sequence of events, it seems, was not nearly as clear-cut. It was in October 1846 – some sixteen months before the February Revolution – that he first drew up a plan for a five-act drama based on the life of Friedrich Barbarossa. He may even have considered writing an opera on Siegfried as early as 1843, when he read Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology), or possibly in 1844, when he borrowed several works on the Nibelungs from the Royal Library in Dresden. As for Die Wibelungen, it would appear that he only started work on this essay in December 1848 at the earliest, finishing it sometime before 22 February 1849, when he read it to his friend Eduard Devrient.For a more detailed discussion of the disputed origins of the Ring, see John Deathridge's essay The Ring: an Introduction, which accompanies the 1991 recording of Siegfried by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra conducted by James Levine (Deutsche Grammophon 429 407-2). See also the same author's essay "Cataloguing Wagner" in The Richard Wagner Centenary in Australia, ed. Peter Dennison (Adelaide, 1985), pp. 185–199.

Whatever the truth, Wagner was certainly contemplating an opera on Siegfried by 1 April 1848, when he informed Devrient of his plans.Eduard Devrient's diary for 1 April 1848 reads: ("He told me of a new plan for an opera on the Siegfried saga.") Two months later, Wagner discussed a similar project with the composer Robert Schumann; an entry in Schumann's notebook (Haushaltbuch), dated 2 June 1848, reads: ("Evening walk w[ith] Wagner – his text on the Nibelungs.")

Wagner was probably encouraged in these endeavours by a number of German intellectuals who believed that contemporary artists should seek inspiration in the pages of the Nibelungenlied, a 12th-century epic poem in Middle High German which, since its rediscovery in 1755, had been hailed by the German Romantics as their country's "national epic". In 1844 the philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer suggested that the Nibelungenlied would make a suitable subject for German opera;Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Vorschlag zu einer Oper ("Suggestion for an Opera") Kritische Gänge, Volume II, Aesthetike (Tübingen, 1844). His scenario consisted of a five-act grand opera to be given on two consecutive evenings – the first dealing with the events of the Nibelungenlied from Siegfried's arrival in Gunther's court to his death, and the second with Kriemhild's revenge. Vischer's treatment of the epic bears little relation to Wagner's, though it may have suggested to Wagner the idea of a series of operas on the Nibelungenlied to be presented on consecutive evenings. and in 1845 and 1846 Louise Otto-Peters and Franz Brendel penned a series of articles in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik inviting composers to write a "national opera" based on the epic. Otto-Peters even wrote a libretto for such an opera.

Wagner, as it happened, was already familiar with the Nibelungenlied. He had even drawn upon it for one of the scenes in an earlier opera, Lohengrin, the text of which was written between July and November 1845. Act II, Scene 4, in which Ortrud interrupts the procession to the minster and confronts Elsa, is based on Chapter 14 of the Nibelungenlied, "How the Queens Railed at Each Other"; in the corresponding scene of Götterdämmerung (also Act II, Scene 4), it is Brünnhilde who interrupts a stately procession and provokes a quarrel.

Wagner the writer Wagner's libretti, which he invariably wrote himself, usually passed through four stages; with one or two minor qualifications, the libretti of the four Ring operas were no different. These stages are as follows:The English terms used here are taken from The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner's Life and Music (see references for details). The corresponding German terms, which are given in parentheses, are taken from the official catalog of Wagner's musical works and their textual sources, Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und ihrer Quellen, which is generally abbreviated to Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis, or WWV.

Prose Sketch (Prosaskizze) – a brief outline of the dramatic action. Typically these sketches consisted of no more than a few paragraphs of prose, though Wagner sometimes added to them or modified them before proceeding to the next stage. This was the case with the sketches for the first three parts of the tetralogy. Exceptionally, however, Wagner (for reasons which will be explained later) never drafted a prose sketch for Götterdämmerung (or Siegfried's Tod, as it was originally called). The prose sketch for Act III of Die Walküre has disappeared. Prose Draft (Prosaentwurf) – an elaborate prose treatment of the opera, describing the action in great detail. These drafts were usually ten or more pages in length. They included a considerable amount of dialogue. Prose drafts survive for all four Ring operas. Verse Draft (Erstschrift des Textbuches) – a first draft of the final libretto, written in an archaic form of German alliterative verse known as Stabreim. Wagner created his verse drafts by versifying the dialogue already contained in his prose drafts – turning prose into poetry – or by creating new verse to replace those sections of the prose drafts for which he had not yet sketched any dialogue. He also added new elements not present in the prose drafts. For instance, the symbolic use of Wotan's spear and its engraved runes to embody the rule of law is not present in the prose draft of Das Rheingold: this idea only came to Wagner while he was working on the verse draft of Die Walküre. It was also while developing the latter that he first thought of making Loge a god of fire: in the prose draft of Das Rheingold he is merely a trickster and teller of unwelcome truths. While writing his verse drafts, Wagner also greatly expanded his stage directions (which, of course, were always in prose). Fair Copy (Reinschrift des Textbuches) – a clean, carefully written verse libretto (or Dichtung, "poem", as Wagner liked to call his finished libretti), usually free of corrections and alterations. Punctuation and capitalization were regularized at this stage. The fair copies generally incorporated the final version of any passage of the corresponding verse draft for which Wagner had sketched two or more competing versions; in a few cases the fair copy has an entirely new variant. The fair copies, however, were not necessarily the final versions of the libretti, as Wagner frequently made slight – but sometimes telling – alterations to the text during the composition of the music. Furthermore, he sometimes made two, three, or even four fair copies, incorporating revisions as he did so, in which case the fair copies are called respectively Zweitschrift (des Textbuches), Drittschrift, Viertschrift, and Fünftschrift.

Siegfried's Tod

As part of his preparations for the projected opera on Siegfried, Wagner first drafted a preliminary study of the relevant German and Nordic myths, Die Nibelungensage (Mythus) (The Nibelung Saga (Myth)). This lengthy prose scenario, which was completed by 4 October 1848, contains an outline of the entire Ring cycle from start to finish, though there is no evidence that Wagner was contemplating anything more at this point than a single opera on the death of Siegfried. When he made a fair copy of this text on 8 October, he renamed it Die Sage von den Nibelungen (The Saga of the Nibelungs). In the collected edition of his works (Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen) it is entitled Der Nibelungen-Mythus: als Entwurf zu einem Drama (The Nibelung Myth: as Sketch for a Drama).

In drafting this prose scenario, Wagner drew upon numerous works of German and Scandinavian mythology, both primary texts (usually in contemporary German translations, though Wagner had some knowledge of Old Norse and Middle German) and commentaries on them. The most important of the former were the Völsunga Saga, the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Nibelungenlied and Thidriks saga af Bern, while the most important of the latter were Jacob Grimm's German Mythology and Wilhelm Grimm's The German Hero-Saga. In addition to these, however, Wagner picked up various details from at least twenty-two other sources, including a number of key philosophical texts that informed the symbolism of the Ring. Wagner contradicts his sources on various points – necessarily so as the sources don’t always agree with one another – conflates disparate stories into continuous narratives, creates some new, memorable characters by combining minor characters from different sources, etc. The final scenario is as much a unique recreation of the original myths as the Nibelungenlied was in its day.

Because Die Sage von den Nibelungen already contained a detailed account of the dramatic action of the proposed opera, Wagner neglected to make any prose sketches according to his usual practice. Instead, he immediately wrote a prose draft of the new work, which was to be called Siegfried's Tod (Siegfried's Death), complete with "English" apostrophe. This apostrophe, incidentally, appears in all the textual manuscripts of the work and in the private imprint of 1853, but was dropped from the title in the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen of 1871–1873.In his correspondence and autobiography, Wagner often refers to Siegfried's Tod as simply Siegfried, which can lead to confusion with the later opera of that name.