Siegfried: English National Opera Guide 28 (English National Opera Guides) - Softcover

Wagner, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0714540404 ISBN 13: 9780714540405

Publisher: Oneworld Classics, 1984

Synopsis

English National Opera Guides are ideal companions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera in English and the original. Wagner wanted Siegfried, the third music drama in The Ring of the Nibelung, to be the most popular of the cycle. Despite its many beautiful and dramatic scenes and its vital part in the drama, it has not fulfilled its composer's aspiration: Professor Ulrich Weisstein examines why. Professor Anthony Newcomb contributes a detailed analysis of Wagner's use of leitmotifs, identifying the different purposes they fulfill. Derrick Puffett takes up the extraordinary fact that Wagner composed Tristan and Isolde and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg in the eight-year hiatus between his beginning and completion of Siegfried's second act; Puffett explores the subsequent changes in Wagner's musical imagination that enabled the composer to complete his enormous task. The thematic guide compliments those found in the other Opera Guides to The Ring Cycle.

About this title

Review

In the third of Wagner's four Ring operas, we meet the loutish young hero, Siegfried, a muscular boor who knows no fear, and Mime, the dwarf who has reared him since the boy's mother, Sieglinde, died in childbirth. Mime is the brother of Alberich (the evil dwarf who set the events of the Ring in motion by stealing the gold of the Rhinemaidens and forging the eponymous ring of power), and extreme unpleasantness seems to be a family trait. Mime wants Siegfried to kill Fafner--the former giant turned dragon--to get his hoard, which includes the ring, after which he plans to poison the youth. Siegfried kills the dragon, but by inadvertently licking some of the beast's blood from his hand, finds he can discover the language of birds. An avian promptly advises him to watch out for Mime--and Siegfried discovers he can hear Mime's evil thoughts. Siegfried kills the dwarf, pockets the ring and the shape-shifting Tarnhelm, and goes off to Brunnhilde's mountaintop. There he breaks his grandfather Wotan's spear, marches through the flames, and wins himself a bride fit for a hero.

This translation beautifully captures Wagner's sometimes impenetrable poetry. The intent, says Rudolph Sabor, is "to provide the reader and singer with a libretto which does not sound like a translation, but rather like the text Wagner might have written had he been born not in Leipzig but in London." Sabor succeeds, and also provides the reader with other useful information, including suggested recordings, side notes on the action, and a key to the leitmotifs that are so essential to understanding the Ring operas.

About the Author

Rudolph Sabor is a writer and lecturer whose books include The Real Wagner. He frequently gives lectures on Wagner and reviews the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth for the major broadsheets and music periodicals.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oneworld Classics
• Publication date: 1984
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0714540404
• ISBN 13: 9780714540405
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 132
• Editor: John Nicholas