these days I'm prepared to give him more credit than I've been in the past. Wagner's source for his exhausting epic was the old German poem the Nibelungenlied, which was probably given its final form around the same time as the stories of Parzival and Tristan and Isolde were taking shape, i.e. about the end of the 12th/start of the 13th century. Those other medieval stories were the source of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and his final opera Parsifal. However, having heard the latter and having also read Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, which was Wagner's specific source text in that case, I know just what liberties Wagner took with his source to come up with his own text. I haven't read any of the Tristan stories other than Malory's version of it in his Chronicle of King Arthur and I don't know what particular version Wagner used for Tristan und Isolde, but I suppose he did something similar. And he certainly played about with the Nibelungenlied. Even if you look no further than the table of contents, you realise how much he left out. The whole second half of the story, to be precise, in which Siegfried's death is avenged with a little help from Attila the Hun. Brunnhilde's position in the original is entirely different, and the gods have only the smallest of bit parts in the poem. Arguably Wagner's filleting of Parzival was a lot worse than that, but that's heavy enough. Fritz Lang's 1920s films of the story, Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge, are much more faithful to the Nibelungenlied than Wagner's operas. (And just as Wagner's Ring cycle was Hitler's favourite opera [or operas], Lang's Nibelungen films were apparently his favourite films.) An advantage the Lang films have over the Wagner operas, apart from their greater textual fidelity, is their brevity compared to the duration of the Ring. They're still fairly longthe versions I have on video occupy about 3 hours of your time between thembut Wagner is four or five times as long....
