SOURCE: Daverio, John. “Wagner's Ring as ‘Universal Poetry.’” In New Studies in Richard Wagner's ‘The Ring of the Nibelung,’ edited by Herbert Richardson, pp. 39-53. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Daverio discusses the unifying structure and technique of the Ring operas.

The text which serves as the point of departure for this essay is the 116th of the fragments published in the Athenäum (1798), a short-lived but highly influential journal founded by Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm. Although Friedrich Schlegel's name does not surface too often in discussions of music, he is considered by most literary historians to be the intellectual father of German Romanticism, and in Fragment 116 he presents a microcosmic account of the new Romantic programme. There he imagines a “progressive, Universal Poetry” that would “reunite all of the separate genres of literature,” “bring poetry together with philosophy...