Arnold Whittall, ‘Accompanied by solemn songs’: Wagner's ‘Ring’ as it might have been

March 2019, Volume 13, Number 1, 4–21.

If only …

For the student of great composers, many ‘if onlys’ crop up as one contemplates the possible choices that lay behind the actual completed works: and with Wagner, no ‘if only’ is more awesome than the possibility that he might have written an opera called Siegfrieds Tod in and immediately after 1848, or else decided that his initial skirmishes with that subject at the age of 35 – represented by a complete libretto and various musical sketches – were so unpromising that it was best to abandon the whole idea.