ABSTRACT
The Loreley myth played an important role in the forging of German national identity in the nineteenth century, particularly through Friedrich Silcher s 1837 setting of Heinrich Heine's Loreley. This chapter encounters Loreley in engravings that decorate sheet music and vocal scores. Loreley, the siren of the Rhine is young for a mythical creature. Richard Wagner's version of the enchantress in the guise of three "mermaid Rhine Maidens” in Der Ring des Nibelungen combines the sexual allure of Loreley plus her mermaid role and its treasures with the Platonic concept of the sirens. Wagner, as Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus puts it, composed in the song of the Rhine Maidens a myth of the genesis of language. Wagner's multiple versions of Loreley in his Rhine Maidens turned the fisherman's daughter into the symbol of the power of music through their effect on the men present in the story.
