David McKee

Fifty-Five Years in Five Acts: My Life in Opera (review)

1. Quoted in Buller, p. 17. See Wagner’s autobiography Mein Leben, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and D. Mack (Munich: Piper, 1976), in two volumes. 2. This last parallel has been articulated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones in Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 126–42. See also the parallels between the Ring and the Prometheus trilogy as noted by Johann Gustav Droysen, who translated the latter. 3. Buller, p. 42. He needlessly repeats this formulation on p. 77; a simple reference to the earlier passage would have suYced. 4. Leitmotif (“leading theme”) was a term Wagner avoided, preferring expressions like Gedächtnismotiv (“theme of memory or association”), or Hauptmotiv. Leitmotif is the English for the German Leitmotiv and its plural in English should be Leitmotifs, not Buller’s Leitmotives. 5. The classical scholar James Diggle pointed out to me the parallel with this passage and Clytemnestra reproaching the Furies (who were to carry out her vengeance) for sleeping at the beginning of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the final play of the Oresteia (A. Eum. 94). Alberich poses his question likewise at the beginning of Götterdämmerung, the final play of the Ring. 6. See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 7. See Buller, p. 69. Buller may have translated Brünnhilde’s comment: “So, let me grant him his name: ‘Siegfried,’ the hero for whom victory is joy.” If the fried element is used to mean “joy,” this is a false etymology. Friede (peace) is not Freude (joy). The German text (“Siegfried erfreu’ sich des Sieg’s!”) simply says that Siegfried rejoices in victory.