Malcolm Miller, Spinning the Yarn: Intertextuality in Wagner’s Use and Reuse of his Songs in his Operas

July 2014, Volume 8, Number 2, 4–27.

‘Was spinnen und singen wir nicht?’ (Why don’t we spin and sing?) asks the Third Norn in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung. The yarn I wish to spin in this article is that which links the music of Wagner’s youth to his maturity, in an investigation into his method of spinning a short-scale work into a larger-scale one, a song into a scene, an act, or across acts to encompass entire operas or music dramas.

Certainly for Wagner, spinning and singing are closely intertwined, weaving a thread spanning some forty years from his earliest works including Gretchen’s Song, composed in 1831 for his own sister to sing in the Seven Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, through the Spinning Chorus of Der fliegende Holländer, to the Norns in Götterdämmerung, who spin the rope of destiny, whilst singing of past, present and future.