Der Ring des Nibelungen

• 1. Introduction

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  Der Ring des Nibelungen is not one opera but four, running across fifteen hours of music and spanning three generations of gods, heroes, and monsters. Opera stage director Anthony Freud called it "the most massive challenge any opera company can undertake" and "the high-water mark" of the art form itself. Richard Wagner wrote both the words and the music, and the task consumed roughly twenty-six years of his life, from 1848 to 1874.

  At the center of everything is a ring. Not a wedding band or a royal signet, but a ring forged from gold stolen from the depths of the Rhine, carrying with it the power to rule the entire world. A dwarf named Alberich makes it. A king of the gods named Wotan takes it from him. Giants demand it as payment for building Valhalla. A grandson of Wotan eventually wins it back by killing a dragon. And in the end, the ring pulls everything into ruin.

  How did one composer set out to write a work this vast? What ideas drove the music's radical invention? And why, more than a century and a half after its premiere, do opera companies still measure themselves against it?

• 2. The Idea Behind the Dramas

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  Wagner's dissatisfaction with conventional opera crystallized around 1851 in an essay called "A Communication to My Friends." He wrote there that modern artists in painting and music had become "feminine," producing "the world of art close fenced from Life, in which Art plays with herself." He wanted something he called the "masculine, the generative path of Art."

  His audiences had already made their preferences clear. The rousing earlier opera Rienzi drew enthusiastic crowds. The more searching Flying Dutchman got a cooler reception. After the premiere of Tannhäuser in 1845, he wrote that audiences left "in a confused and discontented mood" and that he found himself in "utter loneliness." His Tannhäuser, he said, had "appealed to a handful of intimate friends alone."

  His response was an announcement: "I shall never write an Opera more." He would instead call his works "Dramas." He proposed to produce a myth in three complete dramas preceded by a lengthy prelude, all performed at a specially appointed festival over three days and a fore-evening. This was the first public announcement of what would become the Ring cycle.

  The shape of the project was influenced by ancient Greek drama. Wagner modeled the cycle on plays presented as three tragedies and one satyr play. He called Das Rheingold a Vorabend, or Preliminary Evening, and labeled Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung as the First, Second, and Third Days of the trilogy proper.

• 3. Building a Myth from Sources

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  Wagner did not invent the Ring story from nothing. In summer 1848 he wrote a document called The Nibelung Myth as Sketch for a Drama, combining characters and episodes from Germanic and Scandinavian sources into a single narrative.

  The Old Norse Edda texts provided much of the foundation for Das Rheingold. Die Walküre drew heavily on the Völsunga saga, an Icelandic collection of heroic legend. Siegfried braids together the Eddur, the Völsunga saga, and the Thidrekssaga. Götterdämmerung reaches back to the Nibelungenlied, a twelfth-century German poem that had been rediscovered in 1755 and celebrated by German Romantics as the national epic. That poem appears to have been Wagner's original spark.

  The correspondence of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn in 1840 and 1841 shows that the subject was already in the air: Fanny wrote that "the hunt with Siegfried's death provides a splendid finale to the second act." Wagner began with a libretto called Siegfrieds Tod, meaning "Siegfried's Death." By 1850 he felt that a second opera, Der junge Siegfried, was needed to explain the events that preceded the death story. By October 1851 he expanded the plan to four operas. The complete text for all four parts was finished in December 1852 and privately published in February 1853.

  Composition of the music began in November 1853, proceeding in narrative order even though the verses had been written in reverse. Work continued until 1857, when Wagner completed the score up to the end of act two of Siegfried and then set the project aside for twelve years to write Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

• 4. An Orchestra Like No Other

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  Wagner wrote for an orchestra of what he called gargantuan proportions. The core ensemble lists eight horns, three trumpets, a bass trumpet, three tenor trombones, a contrabass trombone, and a contrabass tuba in brass alone. Six harps sit in the string section alongside the usual violins, violas, cellos, and basses.

  For Das Rheingold specifically, the score calls for eighteen offstage anvils. Götterdämmerung requires five offstage horns, three offstage steerhorns, and one onstage steerhorn to be blown by the character Hagen. Wagner also commissioned entirely new instruments to fill sounds he could not find. The Wagner tuba was invented to bridge the tonal gap between the horn and the trombone. He revived the contrabass trombone with a double slide and developed a device he called the Wagner bell to allow the bassoon to reach a low A-natural, a note lower than the instrument could otherwise produce.

  Despite this scale, Wagner was notably sparing with the chorus. He used it only briefly, in acts two and three of Götterdämmerung, and then mostly with men's voices plus a small number of women. The singers themselves were spared from vocal strain by the design of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the purpose-built theatre where the stage blends the massive orchestra sound with the voices so that singers could perform at a natural volume across performances lasting up to five hours.

  The tonal language of the music grows more adventurous as the cycle progresses. From act three of Siegfried onward, much of the music operates not in fixed keys but in what the source describes as "key regions," each flowing into the next. This fluidity, combined with free use of dissonance and chromaticism, would later be identified as a milestone on the path toward Arnold Schoenberg's break with traditional tonality.

• 5. Leitmotifs and the Listening Mind

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  Wagner described the technique that would define the Ring's musical architecture in "Opera and Drama," calling recurring musical phrases his "guides-to-feeling." Scholars would later name them leitmotifs, though Wagner himself did not use that word.

  Each leitmotif musically denotes an action, object, emotion, character, or other dramatic element. Wagner compared their function to that of the Greek chorus in ancient theatre: they inform the listener of a subtext beneath the visible action onstage. A character who lies while the orchestra plays a motif associated with truth creates an irony the ear registers even if the eye cannot see it.

  Wagner scholar Curt von Westernhagen identified three problems from "Opera and Drama" that shaped how the leitmotif technique developed. One was the question of how verse stress could be unified with melody. Another was the disruption formal arias caused in dramatic continuity. The third was how music could be organized on a principle of organic growth rather than the conventions of set-piece opera.

  George Bernard Shaw noted that Wagner did not hold rigidly to these self-imposed rules throughout. By the time Götterdämmerung arrives, Shaw wrote with characteristic bite, "the rest of what you are going to see is opera and nothing but opera," complete with concerted cadenzas and a "magnificent love duet." Shaw called the final opera "Night Falls on the Gods" and described it flatly as "a thorough grand opera." Wagner's architectural ambitions bent under the weight of what drama actually demanded.

• 6. Bayreuth and the First Ring

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  King Ludwig II of Bavaria complicated Wagner's vision before the complete cycle could be staged. Against Wagner's objections, Ludwig insisted on special previews of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre at the National Theatre in Munich. Das Rheingold premiered there on the 22nd of September 1869, and Die Walküre followed on the 26th of June 1870. Wagner was so opposed to this piecemeal presentation that he delayed announcing his completion of Siegfried to prevent a similar fate.

  Wagner had long wanted a dedicated festival theatre designed for the Ring's specific requirements. In 1871 he chose the Bavarian town of Bayreuth as the location. He moved there in 1872 and the foundation stone was laid. Two years of fundraising produced little. Ludwig again intervened, donating the funds needed to complete construction.

  The Bayreuth Festspielhaus opened in 1876 with the first complete performance of the Ring, running from the 13th to the 17th of August. Three years later the first production in the United Kingdom was organized by London impresario Alfred Schulz-Curtius, conducted by Anton Seidl and directed by Angelo Neumann. Wagner died in 1883. Just two months after his death, the first Italian production opened in Venice, at La Fenice, the city where he died. In 1913 the British travelling Quinlan Opera Company, in conjunction with J. C. Williamson's, brought the first Australian Ring to Melbourne and Sydney.

• 7. A Century of Reinvention

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  After the Second World War, the Festspielhaus reopened and Wagner's grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner introduced what became known as the New Bayreuth style, stripping away naturalistic scenery in favor of abstract staging that placed the human drama at the center.

  The centennial production of 1976, called the Jahrhundertring, became perhaps the most debated Ring of the modern era. Director Patrice Chéreau and conductor Pierre Boulez set the action in the Industrial Revolution, replacing the Rhine with a hydroelectric power dam and dressing gods and men in nineteenth and twentieth century business suits. The production drew directly on George Bernard Shaw's 1898 reading of the Ring as a socialist critique of industrial society. Early audiences booed. By 1980, in its final year, the same production received a forty-five-minute ovation.

  Seattle Opera created three distinct productions across four decades. Its second cycle, running from 1985 to 1995, introduced the first supertitles ever created for the Ring, written by Sonya Friedman. Its third production, from 2000 to 2013, drew on the natural landscape of the Pacific Northwest and was recorded commercially on compact disc and iTunes after its 2013 performances conducted by Asher Fisch.

  The Metropolitan Opera's Ring directed by Robert Lepage, which premiered with Das Rheingold on opening night of the 2010-2011 season, centered on a ninety-thousand-pound structure of twenty-four aluminium planks rotating independently on a horizontal axis. The 2013 HD recordings from this production won the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. The Met announced in 2024 that director Yuval Sharon would replace it with a new production, with the first installment set to premiere in the 2027-2028 season and the complete cycle arriving in spring 2030.

• 8. Parody, Adaptation, and Other Rings

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  English-Canadian comedian Anna Russell recorded a twenty-two-minute version of the Ring for her 1953 album Anna Russell Sings! Again?, using camp humour and sharp wit to compress the entire narrative.

  Charles Ludlam's 1977 play Der Ring Gott Farblonjet, produced by the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, offered a full spoof of Wagner's operas. It received a well-reviewed revival in New York at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in 1990.

  In 1991, Seattle Opera premiered Das Barbecü, a musical comedy parody with book and lyrics by Jim Luigs and music by Scott Warrender, transplanting the Ring's plot to Texas ranch country. It later reached off-Broadway and productions around the world.

  Orchestral summaries have condensed the fifteen-hour work into a single movement of roughly an hour. Versions were made by Leopold Stokowski, by Lorin Maazel under the title Der Ring ohne Worte in 1988, and by Henk de Vlieger in a work called The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure in 1991.

  For listeners who want something even more stripped down, a two-evening adaptation by Jonathan Dove for the City of Birmingham Touring Opera in 1990 used a handful of solo singers and only eighteen orchestral players. A cut version running seven hours plus intervals was performed at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires on the 26th of November 2012 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Wagner's birth.