In 1848, Wagner was not yet thinking of a Tetralogy, but of an heroic opera in three acts called Siegfried’s Tod, in which the fatal power of gold was to be symbolised in the treasure of the Niebelungen; and Siegfried was to represent “a socialist redeemer come down to earth to abolish the reign of Capital.”  As the rough draft developed, Wagner went up the stream of his hero’s life.  He dreamed of his childhood, of his conquest of the treasure, of the awakening of Bruennhilde; and in 1851 he wrote the poem of Der Junge Siegfried.  Siegfried and Bruennhilde represent the humanity of the future, the new era that should be realised when the earth was set free from the yoke of gold.  Then Wagner went farther back still, to the sources of the legend itself, and Wotan appeared, the symbol of our time, a man such as you or I—­in contrast to Siegfried, man as he ought to be, and one day will be.  On this subject Wagner says, in a letter to Roeckel:  “Look well at Wotan; he is the unmistakable likeness of ourselves, and the sum of the present-day spirit, while Siegfried is the man we wait and wish for—­the future man whom we cannot create, but who will create himself by our annihilation—­the most perfect man I can imagine.”  Finally Wagner conceived the Twilight of the Gods, the fall of the Valhalla—­our present system of society—­and the birth of a regenerated humanity.  Wagner wrote to Uhlig in 1851 that the complete work was to be played after the great Revolution.

The opera public would probably be very astonished to learn that in Siegfried they applaud a revolutionary work, expressly directed by Wagner against this detested Capital, whose downfall would have been so dear to him.  And he never doubted that he was expressing grief in all these pages of shining joy.

Wagner went to Zurich after a stay in Paris, where he felt “so much distrust for the artistic world and horror for the restraint that he was forced to put upon himself” that he was seized with a nervous malady which nearly killed him.  He returned to work at Der Junge Siegfried, and he says it brought him great joy.

“But I am unhappy in not being able to apply myself to anything but music.  I know I am feeding on an illusion, and that reality is the only thing worth having.  My health is not good, and my nerves are in a state of increasing weakness.  My life, lived entirely in the imagination and without sufficient action, tires me so, that I can only work with frequent breaks and long intervals of rest; otherwise I pay the penalty with long and painful suffering....  I am very lonely.  I often wish for death.

“While I work I forget my troubles; but the moment I rest they come flocking about me, and I am very miserable.  What a splendid life is an artist’s!  Look at it!  How willingly would I part with it for a week of real life.

“I can’t understand how a really happy man could think of serving art.