Az Urzustand megjelenése Wagner Ringjében
Representation of the Urzustand in Wagner’s Ring

Summary/Abstract: Among the great philosophical questions of any epoch is the imagination of the Urzustand - that is, the condition of the world in the very beginning of its existence and its possible change with the appearance of mankind. This informed one of the main philosophical concepts of the nineteenth century, with the ‚state of nature’ regarded as an ideal condition that was disturbed with the development of organised societies. This is an idea which may be represented in the very first scene of the great German composer Richard Wagner’s masterpiece Der Ring des Nibelungen. The author of this article tries to analyse the ouverture of the Ring-cycle’s first opera (Rheingold) according to the mentioned thesis. In his Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner assigned music an outstanding function, as it is able to express emotions and conditions impossible to describe in any other way. The aim of this analysis is, therefore, mainly to deal with the question of how the ancestral state of nature, the Urzustand, can be described with musical elements.

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