Roger Allen, ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new’: ‘Siegfried’ Act III, Scene 1

When on 1 March 1869 Wagner began the first complete draft for Siegfried Act III he was returning to a compositional project essentially dormant since August 1857. There is therefore a biographical element in that the awakening of Erda in the first scene corresponds with the reawakening of Wagner’s interest in his slumbering Nibelungen. As is well known, he ceased work on Siegfried on 9 August 1857 at the end of Act II, and during the intervening twelve-year period – a period of intense creative activity dominated by the composition of Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) – he worked only intermittently on the Nibelungen cycle, completing the first full score of Siegfried Act II on 2 December 1865.