In 1848, a thirty-five-year-old German kapellmeister with revolutionary politics and unpayable debts began sketching an opera about the death of the hero Siegfried. To explain how Siegfried got into his predicament, he decided he needed a preceding opera. Then another. Then another still. By the time Richard Wagner finished the project — twenty-six years later, in 1874 — it had become Der Ring des Nibelungen: four operas designed to be performed on four successive evenings, roughly fifteen hours of music, requiring a new kind of orchestra, a new kind of singer and, since no existing theatre would do, a new opera house built specifically to stage it. Nobody has attempted anything like it since, for the sensible reason that nobody could.
The Ring tells a single story drawn from Norse and Germanic myth: a gold ring, forged from treasure stolen from the river Rhine, carries a curse that destroys everyone who possesses it — dwarves, giants, heroes and finally the gods themselves. The four instalments are Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung ("Twilight of the Gods"), and Wagner, who wrote all his own librettos, composed the texts backwards — starting from Siegfried's death and working towards the beginning — then set them to music forwards. He also stopped for twelve years in the middle of Siegfried, at the end of Act II, and wrote Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger before returning to finish the cycle, a compositional tea-break longer than most careers.
The music of remembering
Musically, the Ring runs on a device that has since conquered the world: the leitmotif, a short musical tag attached to a character, object or idea — the ring, the sword, the curse, fate. Woven and transformed across fifteen hours, the motifs let the orchestra remember, foreshadow and comment on the drama, telling the audience things the characters do not know. Every film score that signals the shark or the villain with a recurring theme is working Wagner's patent; John Williams's scores for Star Wars are the technique's most famous modern descendants. The Ring also contains the most instantly recognisable three minutes Wagner wrote — the "Ride of the Valkyries" that opens Die Walküre's third act, indelibly repurposed for helicopters in Apocalypse Now.
None of this could have been staged without a saviour, and Wagner found the most improbable one in history. In 1864, the eighteen-year-old Ludwig II ascended the Bavarian throne as a besotted Wagner devotee, summoned the composer — then fleeing creditors — and effectively placed the treasury at his art's disposal. Ludwig paid Wagner's debts, funded his living and ultimately underwrote the composer's maddest requirement: a purpose-built festival theatre. The town chosen was Bayreuth, in northern Bavaria, and the Festspielhaus that opened there in 1876 broke every rule of theatre design. Wagner sank the orchestra into a hooded pit beneath the stage, invisible to the audience, so that the sound rose blended and directionless; he darkened the auditorium during performances — then a novelty — and ranked the seating in a single democratic fan with no side boxes for showing off jewellery.
Twilight of the budget
The first complete Ring cycle was performed at Bayreuth in August 1876, an event so unprecedented that kings, an emperor and Europe's musical elite — Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Bruckner and Liszt among them — descended on a small Franconian town with inadequate hotels and, by common complaint, worse catering. Artistically it was epochal; financially it was a disaster, leaving a deficit that nearly killed the festival at birth. Yet Bayreuth survived, run after Wagner's death in 1883 by his widow Cosima — Liszt's daughter — and then by descendants down to the present, becoming the longest queue in classical music: demand for festival tickets famously exceeds supply by years of waiting.
The Ring's afterlife is as outsized as its creation. Conductors treat a complete cycle as an Everest; opera houses budget for it the way small nations budget for infrastructure; and its interpreters have made it mean everything from socialist parable (George Bernard Shaw read it as an allegory of industrial capitalism) to ecological warning. Its composer's later co-option by the Nazis — Hitler was a Bayreuth regular — has permanently complicated its reception, and Wagner's own vicious antisemitism remains the unavoidable stain on the achievement. The work itself ends in cleansing catastrophe: Valhalla burns, the Rhine overflows, and the ring returns to the river it was stolen from. Wagner spent twenty-six years and a king's fortune to reach that final chord — a story about the ruinous price of wanting one object too much, written by a man who understood the condition from the inside.
Quiz nuggets
- Wagner's Ring cycle comprises four operas — Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung — written over about 26 years (1848–1874).
- King Ludwig II of Bavaria bankrolled Wagner and the purpose-built Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which opened in 1876.
- The Festspielhaus hides its orchestra in a hooded pit beneath the stage, and the first complete Ring cycle was staged there in August 1876.
- Wagner wrote the Ring librettos in reverse story order, and paused composing Siegfried for about 12 years to write Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger.
- The "Ride of the Valkyries" opens Act III of Die Walküre and was famously used in Apocalypse Now.