Info

Home Page / About Wagnerheim
Introduction by Roger Scruton
About the Author
Interactive Features
Wagner Lecture Videos
Wagner Lecture / Papers Transcript
Links
Contact Us
Discussion Forum

Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication Page
General Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for key references
Guide to abbreviations used in text
Allen Dunning's numbered Guide to the Ring's Musical Motifs
Detailed Table of Contents

The Ring

Introduction


References
Appendix I
Appendix I I

Key Colour Coding

Donations Welcome

I would be grateful for donations of any size, small or large, to help defray the cost (1) of maintaining this website, (2) and to finance my past and present research which produced my book posted here, Volume One of "The Wound That Will Never Heal," and my forthcoming revision of Volume One (to be submitted for publication), and completion of Volume Two on Wagner's six other canonic operas and music-dramas. I sacrificed at least seven years of paid employment and incurred debts to complete this project, and am currently unemployed, so I thank you in advance for any financial help you can provide. Your friend, Paul Heise.

instrument), answers that he swears this to himself. As Alberich slowly disappears from view along with the night, we hear a new motif, #168ab, representing, as Cooke puts it, the dawn of that day on which Hagen will set in motion the concluding piece of his plan to discredit the Waelsung hero Siegfried and regain possession of the power of the Ring which Siegfried has (unwittingly) co-opted. Cooke, accordingly, calls this two segment motif “Hagen’s Day.” Cooke described the music which depicts the rising sun as beginning with a variant of #1, the Original Nature Arpeggio with which the Ring began, and which in a sense contains the seed of all the music, and musical motifs, of the Ring, which then becomes a canon, and shortly thereafter is transformed into a brutal brassy music associated with Hagen’s expectation of victory, the motif #168. #168 finally develops into its definitive form, #168ab, the segment “#168b” being a powerful repetition of a three-note figure which will later be sung by the Gibichung clan chorus in T.2.3, in praise of Hagen’s newly acquired status as wedding herald.