Wagner and the LittLe BaLLet Master that CouLd Laura ginters university of sydney When the other big engines refuse, the Little Blue Engine tries to pull a stranded train full of toys and food over the mountain. It’s a big job and daunting for the little engine. But the Little Blue Engine persists, say- ing to himself, as he slowly moves up the mountain; “I think I can, I think I can, I-think-I-can . . .” He reaches the top and rushes triumphantly down the other side: “I thought I could, I thought I could . . .” The much loved sTory of the “Little Engine That Could” is intended to teach children the value of persistence and optimism, especially in the face of a daunting and seemingly impossible task. This classic tale sprang often to mind as I began researching the genesis of the premiere of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Bayreuth in 1876. 1 The idea of the small, inadequately equipped engine hauling the loaded, stranded train over the huge mountain and safe to the other side seemed a rather appropriate metaphor for the almost Quixotic endeavour of rehearsing and staging this frst Ring cycle—and the sense of how narrowly the whole thing avoided becoming a train wreck also plays into this metaphor. The diminutive size of the engine which was the driving force also resonated with my impressions of Wagner’s “little balletmaster”, Richard Fricke, who was instrumental in getting the Ring on. I describe him in this way because this was how Wagner and his wife, Cosima, referred to Fricke—he was for them their “little balletmaster”. 2 This is a reference, obviously, to his physical stature, but there is also more at work here: for readers of Fricke’s diary accounts of those rehears- als today, there’s also an implicit comparison with the towering greatness that was Richard Wagner. Wagner himself was actually also a small man, a fact Fricke refers to several times in his diaries, 3 but in his lifetime, certainly, and cultivated even more carefully and assiduously posthumously, is the im- age of Wagner as larger than life—a Titan, indeed, as one of his biographers would have it (Köhler 2004). Certainly Fricke’s constant designation as “the little balletmaster” would appear to circumscribe and quite specifcally defne his role within the larger rehearsal process, but as I’ll demonstrate this is hardly an accurate refection of the signifcance of his contribution to the staging of the Ring. Wagner clearly held Fricke in high esteem—“how much I value you and how much I enjoyed your collabora- tion in Bayreuth!” (Fricke 1998, 103)—and it is true that Fricke is credited on the offcial Bayreuther Festspiele site as being responsible, along with Wagner, for production and stage direction, but he remains nonetheless “one of the least appreciated of the important contributors to the 1876 premiere of the Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth” (Fricke 1998, vii). 4 Though the original German text of Fricke’s diaries (frst published in 1906) was re-issued in 1983 and there are several translations into English of Fricke’s diaries (Fricke 1998; 1990 and 1991) 5 there is little else written on Fricke—a single Being There: After Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies