7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7for an opera, and having written an operatic “poem,”
Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried ’s Death), in which he conceived of
Siegfried as the new type of man who would emerge after
the successful revolution he hoped for, he now wrote a
number of prose volumes on revolution, social and artistic.
From 1849 to 1852 he produced his basic prose works: Die
Kunst und die Revolution (Art and Revolution), Das Kunstwerk
der Zukunft (The Art Work of the Future), Eine Mitteilung an
meine Freunde (A Communication to My Friends), and Oper
und Drama (Opera and Drama). The latter outlined a new,
revolutionary type of musical stage work—the vast work,
in fact, on which he was engaged. By 1852 he had added to
the poem of Siegfrieds Tod three others to precede it, the
whole being called Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the
Nibelung) and providing the basis for a tetralogy of musical
dramas: Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold); Die Walküre (The
Valkyrie); Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried), later called
simply Siegfried; and Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried ’s Death), later
called Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods).
The Ring reveals Wagner’s mature style and method,
to which he had found his way at last during the period
when his thought was devoted to social questions. He
prophesied the disappearance of opera as artificial enter-
tainment for an elite and the emergence of a new kind of
musical stage work for the people, expressing the self-
realization of free humanity. The new art form would be a
poetic drama that should find full expression as a musical
drama set to a continuous vocal-symphonic texture. This
texture would be woven from basic thematic ideas, which
Wagner called “motives,” but which have since come to be
known as “leading motives” (German Leitmotive, singular
Leitmotiv). The leading motives would arise naturally as
expressive vocal phrases sung by characters and would be
developed by the orchestra as “reminiscences” to express
the dramatic and psychological development.