Victoria Parrott, ‘Das freie kühne Weib’: ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ and the German Women’s Movement

March 2026, Volume 20, Number 1, 21–40.

In the spring of 1878, Louise Otto-Peters attended a production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in Leipzig, the first staging of the complete tetralogy outside Bayreuth. Otto-Peters, a leading member of the German women’s movement, edited the women’s periodical Neue Bahnen (New Paths), in which she published an enthusiastic review of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. In her article she wrote:

According to our custom, we especially commemorate the female characters […]. It is truly remarkable how Wagner is able to create the most diverse female characters both poetically and musically, and to distinguish them from one another. In contrast to the male greed, raw passion and violence, deceit and malice, the women always embody the noble, pure and sublime.