Abstract It was in the period following his participation in the Dresden uprising (May 1849) and subsequent flight to Switzerland that Wagner wrote his first books of operatic theory: Art and Revolution (1849), The Art Work of the Future (1850), and Opera and Drama (1852). His composing was at a standstill; his latest opera, Lohengrin, completed in 1848, was performed in his absence in 1850. But already in Dresden he had begun work on what was to become the major undertaking of his life, the vast Ring of the Nibelung cycle; so far he had only written the text of the last of the four dramas, Cotterdammerung (initially Siegfrieds Tod, later much revised), and twenty-six years were to pass before he would complete the whole cycle. But this, and the other three great works that lay ahead-Tristan und Isolde (1859), Die Meistersinger (1867), Parsifal (1882)-were no longer to be cast in the mold of traditional opera.