"[Devrient] showed me, for instance, that before Siegfried and Brünnhilde are displayed in a position of bitter hostility towards each other, they ought first to have been presented in their true and calmer relationship. I had, in fact, opened the poem of Siegfried's Tod with those scenes which now form the first act of Götterdämmerung. The details of Siegfried's relation to Brünnhilde had been merely outlined to the listeners in a lyrico-episodical dialogue between the hero's wife, whom he had left behind in solitude, and a crowd of Valkyries passing before her rock." (Wagner, Mein Leben)
"I wrote a short preface dedicating [the libretto of Siegfried's Tod] to my friends as a relic of the time when I had hoped to devote myself entirely to art, and especially to the composition of music. I sent this manuscript to Herr Wigand in Leipzig, who returned it to me after some time with the remark, that if I insisted on its being printed in Latin characters he would not be able to sell a single copy of it." (Wagner, Mein Leben.) On 18 December 1848 Wagner had abandoned the old Gothic script in favour of modern Roman script.
"I now [May 1851] conceived the idea of the poem of Junger Siegfried, which I proposed to issue as a heroic comedy by way of prelude and complement to the tragedy of Siegfried's Tod." (Mein Leben.) There is no evidence at this stage that Wagner intended this new opera to be the second part of a trilogy of operas.
In Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde Wagner had described Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as "a comic piece which well might form a Satyr-play as pendant to my Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg [i.e. Tannhäuser]". He never explicitly referred to Das Rheingold as a satyr play, but such a description is a commonplace amongst contemporary critics. See, for example, Hugh Canning's review in the Sunday Times of Simon Rattle's 2006 production of the opera at Aix[1]
