Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung

The Rainbow Bridge from the Met's old production of Wagner's Das Rheingold

As works of art go, there are few on the scale of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung.  The Ring Cycle, or simply The Ring, consists of four operas: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.  While each of these is a stand-alone opera, The Ring is often performed over several nights so that it is possible to experience the entire Ring as one 15-hour marathon event.  I know this is what I was after when I added the Ring to my bucket list.  A few years ago, I got my hands on a $1000 ticket to a nearby performance of The Ring. Even though I was familiar with other Wagner operas, I figured I’d better prepare for The Ring.  For fifteen hours, I sat on my couch and listened to a recording of the Ring with a translation of the libretto in my lap.  What I discovered was that the Ring is epic but not simply because it's long.  Here is no less than the story of the creation and destruction of the world.  Gods, men, giants, and dwarves populate a landscape of rivers, clouds, rainbows, underworld caverns, dark woods, and rings of fire.  It’s brimming with joy, despair, greed, heroism, love, lust, treachery, betrayal, incest, and ruin.  And through it all is Wagner’s symphonic music – soaring with a richness and passion unheard of in the world of pretty arias characteristic of Italian opera.  Needless to say, I was blown away…and wasn’t even sure why.  On the surface, The Ring has a fairy-tale simplicity to it.  Yet, through what can only be described as primordial memory, it pings at one’s very sense of humanity and purpose in the grand scope of creation.  What hath Wagner wrought?

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (May 22,1813 – February 13,1883) was born in Leipzig, Germany during the height of music’s Romantic Period.  Inspired by Beethoven, Wagner wanted to bring the grandeur of symphonic music to the theatre.  He despised Grand Opera and its obsession with vocal prowess.  His early operas, The Flying Dutchman (1943), Tännhauser (1845), and Lohengrin (1850), are highly romantic works which demonstrated his growing command of storytelling, stagecraft, and symphonic orchestration.  He developed the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art that affects us at a deep personal level through the synthesis of poetic, visual, musical, and dramatic arts. This was revolutionary stuff.  But Wagner’s revolutionary ideas weren’t limited to the opera world: his part in the Dresden uprisings of 1848 resulted in a warrant for his arrest.  He escaped to Switzerland where he lived in exile for the next twelve years.

For the source of his next opera, Wagner turned to a twelfth-century German epic, Nibelungenlied.  No sooner had he worked out the scenario for “Siegfried’s Death”, he decided he needed another opera to tell Siegfried’s backstory and yet another about Siegfried’s parents, Siegmund and Sieglinde, and the Walküre, Brünhilde.  In the process, Wagner went far beyond the Nibelungenlied by mining the earlier Norse sagas recorded in the Poetic Edda.  Rhine maidens, gods, giants, dragons, and Der Walküre took their places in his rapidly expanding epic.  He added one more opera about the theft of the Rhinegold by the dwarf Alberich to kick the whole thing off.  After five years writing from back to front, he returned to the ending and added the twilight of the gods, the destruction of the world, and the return of gold to the Rhine.  In 1853, Wagner published the four libretti of Der Ring des Nibelungen: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.  Turning to the music, Wagner put his Gesamtkunstwerk idea to the test by writing dozens of leitmotifs, “motifs of memory”,  to represent characters, settings, objects, and concepts.   Leitmotifs convey ideas and emotions beyond the words of the libretto, weaving a rich tapestry of music around the story.  The music was written from front to back with each opera débuting when completed. To deal with the long gaps between productions, Wagner added helpful recaps at the beginning of the last two operas.  These recaps are a little tedious when seeing the operas in a short period of time, particularly that of the Three Norns in Götterdämmerung.  The Ring of the Nibelungen was first performed in its entirety in 1876, twenty-six years after the project was started, at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, Wagner’s new opera house built specifically for The Ring.

So what is the story of The Ring?  Well, rather than try to summarize the 15 hours here, I’ll defer to legendary musical satirist, Anna Russell.  In a classic bit of comedy, she goes through all four operas only to end up right back where she started.  Enjoy!

The century and a quarter that has passed since Wagner’s day have seen many changes in attitude toward The Ring.  In the early days, the operas were performed with naturalistic sets and low-tech special effects.  The logistics of staging the more spectacular scenes has dogged production designers since Wagner’s day.    Those poor women playing the Rhine maidens have been strapped into all kinds of contraptions to simulate their frolicking in the Rhine.   Wagner himself wasn’t satisfied with 19^th century stagecraft’s ability to represent dragons, rainbow bridges, and the burning and flooding of the world.  Then came the Nazis, who unfortunately loved The Ring.  They saw their Aryan ideals reflected in Siegfried and their anti-Semitism reflected in Alberich and Mime.  After WWII, the association with Nazis was so strong that The Ring had a serious public relations problem.  In a Looney Tunes cartoon called “What’s Opera, Doc?”, Bugs Bunny is pursued by Elmer Fudd singing “kill the wabbit.” The Flight of the Walküre would never be the same after Francis Ford Coppola used it score the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now.  In time, a new generation of artists brought The Ring to the boards again but in far more abstract ways.  Recently, the New York Metropolitan Opera staged brand new productions of the four operas produced by Robert Lapage.  These operas feature a massive set piece of moving parallel beams that tilt and twist to create various landscapes.  Each beam has a video screen surface that brings the stage to life as it simulates earth, water and fire.  Even Siegfried’s bird flutters around the set like never before.  Here’s a peek.

Despite the changing times, audiences around the globe still flock to productions of Wagner’s masterpiece.  No wonder!  No matter how many times you see it, no matter how much you study the music and libretto, you can never exhaust it.   

Lee, M. Owen, Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Around. An Introduction to The Ring of the Nibelung.  Limelight Editions, New York, NY,1990.

Langford, Jeffery, Evenings at the Opera: An exploration of the basic repetoire. Amadeus Press, Milwaukee, WI, 2011.

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