This is a collection of writing spanning the years 2024-2026 about Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Some of these essays have been published elsewhere, others are new. Many of the pieces from 2024, which themselves were ways of working through the work, are being updated and revised to reflect a more cohesive and consolidated perspective. A comprehensive guide to the "Ring," originally published in 2025, is a suitable place for newcomers to start. New in 2026 are a handful of new essays, including longer analyses of two of the four music dramas (as Wagner called them), Das Rheingold and Siegfried that explore more expanded thematic content. Also in progress are pages devoted to specific topics within the "Ring." (These are not so much essayistic as they are diagrammatic.)
This website, Wehwalt.net, is named after the pseudonym (broadly translatable as "Sorrowful") of the hero Siegmund from Die Walküre who, in this set of analyses is considered not only the dearest but the most important character in the entire work. This is because it is Siegmund's life that reveals the contours of the Ring's world and its mechanisms of agency and because it is Siegmund, along (and interchangeably!) with his sister Sieglinde, who not only creates through love and solidarity the possibility of another, better, and freer world but who serves as catalyst for the foreclosure of the one at hand, the world of the gods, which, across the span of the cycle gradually succumbs to greed, despotism, and nihilism, in that order. To love in a loveless world speaks to a truth most of us, trapped as we are in the times we are living, need desperately to believe: that there are always cracks in the conditions of evil from which a new way of being can bloom, to speak in Siegmundian terms, like springtime, anew.
All images used on this website are in the Public Domain.
It is highly recommended that the reader begin with and bookmark the 'Useful Resources' page, as it includes instructions on where to watch or listen to the "Ring", how to go about doing so, information related to the leitmotifs (including various indices), recommended reading, etc.
All material © Kate Wagner (2026.) For inquiries, please email kate @ wehwalt.net.