Theology of Wagner's Ring Cycle I

Wagner's leitmotifs were intentionally constructed as compact, discrete musical units charged with extramusical meaning. Should they be considered merely as arbitrary signifiers, whose signifieds are discovered only through the dramatic context of their appearance? The research reported here rejects this possibility, demonstrating experimentally that the leitmotifs bear inherent meaning. It is this meaning that grants them their communicative potential and provides a basis for the specific message given them in the setting of the specific musical work. A selection of nine representative leitmotifs from Wagner's Ring cycle was played to subjects during the course of a two-part experiment. The first part, which was designed on the basis of the semantic differential technique, yielded several significant factors that defined an inclusive connotative space. The second part of the experiment was designed and evaluated according to the "semantic integral" method, which was developed for the purpose of adding a denotative dimension, using titles given to the leitmotifs by the subjects. The results substantiated the existence of complementary relations between the connotative and denotative aspects of the leitmotifs. Findings of this sort should assist in explaining how the leitmotifs function within the dramatic context. The methods applied, as well as the findings arrived at, disclose, we believe, essential characteristics of the semantic structure of music in general.

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Intertextualities in Elfriede Jelinek’s Rein Gold: Ein Bühnenessay

Seminar A Journal of Germanic Studies ◽

10.3138/seminar.57.2.2 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 57 (2) ◽

pp. 114-133

Author(s):

Britta Kallin

Keyword(s):

Hate Crime ◽

First Century ◽

Right Wing ◽

National Socialist ◽

Communist Manifesto ◽

German Identity ◽

Ethnic Germans ◽

History Of ◽

Ring Cycle ◽

Twenty First Century

Elfriede Jelinek’s postdramatic stage essay Rein Gold (2012) interweaves countless texts including Richard Wagner’s operas from the Ring cycle, Karl Marx’s The Capital, and Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto as well as contemporary writings and news articles. Scholarship has so far examined the play in comparison to Wagner’s Rheingold opera, which serves as the base for the dialogue between the father Wotan and daughter Brünnhilde. This article examines intertextualities with the story of the National Socialist Underground, an extremist right-wing group that committed hate-crime murders and bank robberies, and with the exploitative history of workers, particularly women, in capitalist systems. Jelinek compares the National Socialist Underground’s attempt to violently rid Germany of non-ethnic Germans with Siegfried’s mythical fight as dragon slayer in the Nibelungenlied that created a hero who has been cast as a German identity figure for an ethnonational narrative and fascist ideas in twenty-first-century Germany.

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