There is growing recognition that Richard Wagner’s mature music dramas owed much to earlier 19th-century opera, and the analytical implications of this knowledge remain an intriguing area for exploration. This paper demonstrates one specific generic connection: lyric form (AABA or AABC), an Italian model for short, unified, expressive monologues. Drawing from the work of Robert Moreen, I theorize lyric form as a conventional template—i.e., a construction—for the organization of both music and text, in which formal function and rhetorical function are merged. As I show through several examples, Wagner continued to use this template in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in a largely traditional (if flexible) way, especially with regard to its shared music-rhetorical functions.
The novelty of Wagner’s usage comes in part from his vigorous commitment to dramatic verisimilitude: every lyric-form monologue is “realistically” integrated into a conversation in order to maintain a clear thread of dramatic continuity. Thus, within the first two Ring operas the overarching music-dramatic function of a lyric form lies mainly in the communicative aims of its speaker. In each example I discuss, the monologue is performative in J. L. Austin’s sense: its communicative purpose extends beyond its verbal content. Drawing from work by Edward Cone and Peter Kivy, I call these situations semidiegetic because the music can be heard as a representation of the performative dimension of a character’s speech, even when that character is not literally singing within the story.