During the first half of the 18th century German intellectuals were
aware that their culture lacked the deep roots in Roman civilisation
that were shared by the "Latin" countries, including Italy and France.
Those countries had continuous linguistic and cultural traditions that
could be traced back to the Roman Empire. In Germany, which at that time
did not exist as a nation but only as a commonality of language, even
that language did not belong to the family of Romance languages. One
result of this concern on the part of German intellectuals was their
attempt to recover a German cultural tradition from the Middle Ages and,
in order to push their roots deeper into human history, scholars sought
the antecedents of medieval literature in the Icelandic sagas and poems.
It was from this rediscovered heritage that RW began to develop his
scenarios for truly German art.

Wagner realised that it was possible to side-step the issue of Romance
civilisation by building upon the artistic achievements of the Greeks.
So he looked back, far beyond the Middle Ages, to the arts of the lyric
age of Greece and in particular to Athenian tragedy. Wagner developed a
theory that the separate arts -- the primary trio of poetry, music and
dance/mime, and the secondary trio of painting, sculpture and
architecture -- had once been united, in the dramas of ancient Greece.
This unity had begun to fall apart in the 5th century BCE and the arts
were now overdue to be reunited. Therefore Wagner conceived the idea of
creating a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), in which the separate
arts would once more assist each other. He argued that music had reached
its limits in the works of Beethoven, who had discovered, when composing
his 9th symphony, that he needed the assistance of Schiller's poetry in
order to go beyond those limits. Just as, in that case, poetry had come
to the aid of music, so could music come to the aid of poetry as spoken
drama, and dance/mime or dramatic gesture could assist both.