I think this is true of any opera, even if it's in English, say something by Benjamin Britten like 'Owen Wingrave'. The more research the better, of course, but my remarks were based largely on the sense that the most important thing is to realize that you are dealing with 4 discrete operas that are often done separately in a season instead of a whole cycle (as the Met did 'Siegfried' in 1999 or 2000). When people think of 'getting familiar with the Ring Cycle', therefore, they might think of it as 'less daunting' if they thought of getting familiar with one per year (at least till they got well-started on it, and definitely don't start with 'Das Rheingold' unless you are sure you are going to tackle all of it), or seeing, say, 'Gotterdamerung' in quite the same way as 'Lohengrin.' After all, Lohengrin and Parsifal are son and father, but the operas which bear their names are not paired, but they are actually just as intertextual as the Ring Cycle in terms of their characters (but not in the music, of course, as much, since Parsifal is written much later (34 years later), the last of the operas, so I suppose in vulgar parlance Parsifal could be called something of a prequel in the Holy Grail series.)

Anyway, thanks for pointing out that it's 10 notes. I think the quote Mahler uses is one of the shorter versions, when it is like a kind of question in 'the Siegfried Idyll'. Quite a bit different from Jerry Herman's settling out of court for lifting a little too much from an old ditty called 'Sunflower' for his huge hit, the title song from 'Hello, Dolly!'