Opera as Comics: Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung in Craig P. Russell’s Graphic Adaptation

The paper discusses P. Craig Russell’s graphic adaptation of Richard Wagner’s dramatic tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung. Originally, the series was released monthly by Dark Horse Comics (2000-2001), in 2014 it was published as a two-volume paperback. Wagner’s music has entered the American cultural scene in the second half of the 19th-century, predominantly due to the notable influence of German immigrants, and its impact is still vivid in the 21st-century. Despite the fact that American acceptance of Wagner was not universal and his political opinions are still disputed, his work has significantly affected the development of American music, poetry, and popular culture. Though Russell does not belong to the greatest formal innovators in comics, his merging of opera and comics turned out to be not only original but also a critically acclaimed format. Russell interprets the Ring Cycle as an essential predecessor of American superhero comics, thereby making the complex work feel familiar to wide audiences. His Ring Cycle adaptation includes behind-the-scenes production art, notes of the artist, or history of the opera itself. Drawing on the hybridity of both comics and opera, the paper discusses the visual aspects of the adaptation and the transmedial methods which Russell used to adapt opera and its effects into graphic novel. The main focus will on the illustration style and its cultural impact on the unifying social function of the comics medium, and, more importantly, the methods of transmission of sounds into the silent medium, with special attention paid to the meaning and visual form of the Wagnerian leitmotiv.

Intertextualities in Elfriede Jelinek’s Rein Gold: Ein Bühnenessay

Elfriede Jelinek’s postdramatic stage essay Rein Gold (2012) interweaves countless texts including Richard Wagner’s operas from the Ring cycle, Karl Marx’s The Capital, and Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto as well as contemporary writings and news articles. Scholarship has so far examined the play in comparison to Wagner’s Rheingold opera, which serves as the base for the dialogue between the father Wotan and daughter Brünnhilde. This article examines intertextualities with the story of the National Socialist Underground, an extremist right-wing group that committed hate-crime murders and bank robberies, and with the exploitative history of workers, particularly women, in capitalist systems. Jelinek compares the National Socialist Underground’s attempt to violently rid Germany of non-ethnic Germans with Siegfried’s mythical fight as dragon slayer in the Nibelungenlied that created a hero who has been cast as a German identity figure for an ethnonational narrative and fascist ideas in twenty-first-century Germany.

Wagner’s Poetry of the Spheres

Chapter Four moves beyond the boundaries of the comparative linguistic tradition to explore Richard Wagner’s extraordinarily influential, poetico-musical “realization” of the philological fantasy about Germanic verse origins, as described in Chapter Three. This chapter argues that Wagner’s dramatic project in the Ring cycle, which was inspired by his intense engagement with the language theories of Jacob Grimm, must be understood as an attempt to harness the rhythms of ancient alliterative verse to an all-encompassing, neo-Pythagorean model of cosmic-acoustic accord, such that the meter of his own, mid-19th century alliterations—when united with the harmonic modulations of his music—merges with the “meter” of the world spirit progressing through history.