I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner's Ring

by Deryck Cooke

Long considered a masterpiece, Wagner's Ring has baffled and confused critics because of the highly complex meaning of its text and music. The diverse range of commentaries written on the subject since the first performance over one hundred years ago reveals just how little critics have understood The Ring. Deryck Cooke displays his masterly common sense in this study of how and why The Ring took the shape it did. This volume represents only a portion of the enormous book he had planned--his untimely death prevented him from writing a full analysis of the music. Even as it stands, I Saw The World End will give fresh understanding and appreciation to every lover of Wagner's music.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 1979

Reviews

[Carmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a real shame Deryck Cooke died before he got to #3 and #4 (eg the two operas I personally need the most help with) but what's here is terrific. Once past the extraordinarily dense and difficult opening it's very readable and enjoyable and strikes a great balance between textual, musical, historical, and mythological analysis. Also, you can pry my feminist interpretation of the Ring Cycle from my cold dead hands and Cooke gives me yet more ammo.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Deryck Cooke would have managed to stay alive long enough to complete this study, it would have been the most comprehensive treatment of Wagner's Nibelungen operas in English. Unfortunately the current state of the work only covers Das Das Rheingold
and Die Walküre.

While the analysis of the operas only covers the first two works of the cycle, the middle section of the book contains a pretty comprehensive study of the Medieval sources. If the reader combines this book with Elisabeth Magee's Wagner and the Nibelungs and Edward Haymes recent study of source material in Wagner's Ring in 1848

[Paul Doody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deryck Cooke was one of the best musicologists, his thoughts cogent and brilliantly expressed. This was to have been his magnum opus, a detailed account of Wagner's Ring. Sadly, Cooke passed away before he could complete the work, but what we have is one of the most trenchant critiques of this most essential of master-works. Everything Cooke has to say makes for great reading.

[Dominic H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cooke envisaged this as comprehensive analysis of Wagner's Ring. His point inter alia was that previous studies had focussed on the texts only and come up short. How sad therefore that all that was completed before his death was his analysis of the texts of Rheingold and Walküre. Before he gets to those, he spends some time explaining the shortcomings of what were at the time (1970s) the only serious studies of the Ring in English. He rightly I think dismisses Donnington's 'Wagner's Ring and its Symnbols' as been hopelessly encumbered by its Jungian perspective. However he either fails to see or deliberately misunderstands what Shaw's 'Perfect Wagnerite' is about. It's so obviously *not* a study of the Ring in the conventional sense of textual analysis and so clearly a manifesto of sorts that although I think it's still worth reading for a number of reasons, I don't know why for his purposes Cooke lavishes time and page space on it.
I can't help feeling what remains is a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. Interesting though some of Cooke's writings on the texts is, the book seems to move to another more exalted plain virtually every time he talks about the music. He does so with an acute combination of musicological, literary and psychological analysis but in the book as is, there are only short sections and fragments of such writing, which offer a taste of what could have been one of the truly great and definitive works on the Ring and Wagner. I should add that in order for that to happen he would also necessarily have had to strike a balance between being dutifully completist and commenting on the aspects of the work which seemed of particular interest and importance to him. As it stands, there is a bit too much of the former as the book gets into the detailed commentaries on the Rhinegold and Valkyrie texts.

[Joshua Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although a bit dense and tough to read at times, this is a great (albeit incomplete, due to the author's passing halfway through the book) analysis of the sources of Wagner's Ring Cycle, as well as a detailed analysis of the first two operas' sources, texts and meanings. It's too bad Cooke didn't live to finish the final two operas' analysis as well as the detailed musical analysis that was to happen in the latter half of the book.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

To-buy.