Der Ring des Nibelungen

Der Ring des Nibelungen or, translated commonly as The Ring of the Nibelungen into English but more correctly as The Nibelung's Ring, is a series of four epic operas. Both the libretto and the music were written by Richard Wagner over the course of twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874.

Content

The Ring is a work of extraordinary scale and scope. Its most obvious quality, for a first-time listener, is its sheer length: a full performance of the cycle takes place over four nights at the opera, with a total playing time of about 15 hours, depending on the conductor's pacing. The first and shortest opera, Rheingold, typically clocks in at two and a half hours, while the last and longest, Götterdämmerung, can take up to five hours in performance.

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The scale and scope of the story is epic. It follows the struggles of gods, heroes, and several mythical creatures, over the eponymous magic Ring that grants domination over the entire world. The drama and intrigue continues through three generations of protagonists, until the final cataclysm at the end of Götterdämmerung.

Related Topics:
God - Hero

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The music of the Ring is thick and richly textured, and grows in complexity as the cycle proceeds. Wagner wrote for an orchestra of gargantuan proportions. He eventually had a purpose-built theatre (the Bayreuth Festspielhaus) constructed in Bayreuth in which to perform this work, which had taken him about a quarter of a century to write. The theatre had a special stage which blended the huge orchestra with the singers' voices, allowing them to sing at a natural volume. The result was that the singers did not have to strain themselves vocally during the long performances. The acoustics of this performance space are among the best in the world. In other performance venues singers sometimes find it difficult to achieve this balance between voice and orchestra.

Related Topics:
Orchestra - Bayreuth Festspielhaus - Bayreuth

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Story

The plot revolves around a magic ring that grants the power to rule the world, forged by the Nibelung dwarf Alberich from gold stolen from the river Rhine. Several mythic figures struggle for possession of the Ring, including Wotan (Odin), the chief of the Gods. Wotan's scheme, spanning generations, to overcome his limitations, drives much of the action in the story. The hero Siegfried wins the Ring, as Wotan intended, but is eventually betrayed and slain. Finally, the Valkyrie Brünhilde, Siegfried's lover and Wotan's estranged daughter, returns the Ring to the Rhine. In the process, the Gods are destroyed.

Related Topics:
Nibelung - Dwarf - Alberich - Rhine - Wotan (Odin) - Gods - Siegfried - Valkyrie - Brünhilde

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For a detailed plot synopsis, see the articles for the individual operas.

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Wagner created the story of the Ring by fusing elements from many German and Scandinavian myths and folk tales. The Old Norse Eddas supplied much of the material for Das Rheingold, which also contains the same plot device as the tale Puss-in-Boots, while Die Walküre was largely based on the Volsunga saga. Siegfried contains elements from the Eddas, the Volsunga Saga, Thidreks saga, and even the Grimm brothers' fairy tales The Tale of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear and Sleeping Beauty. The final opera, Götterdämmerung, draws from the 12th century High German poem known as the Nibelungenlied, which appears to have been the original inspiration for the Ring, and for which the cycle was named. (For a detailed examination of Wagner's sources for the Ring, and his treatment of them, see among other works Deryck Cooke's tragically unfinished study of the Ring, I Saw the World End, and Ernest Newman's Wagner Nights. Also useful is a translation by Stewart Spencer (Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung: Companion, edited by Barry Millington) which, as well as containing essays including one on the source material, provides an English translation of the entire text which seeks to remain faithful to the early medieval Stabreim technique Wagner used.)

Related Topics:
German - Scandinavia - Folk tales - Old Norse - Edda - Volsunga saga - Thidreks saga - Grimm brothers' - 12th century - Nibelungenlied - Deryck Cooke - English

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In weaving these disparate sources into a coherent tale, Wagner injected many contemporary concepts. One of the principal themes in the Ring is the struggle of love, which is also associated with Nature and freedom, against power, which is associated with civilization and law. In the very first scene of the Ring, the scorned dwarf Alberich sets the plot in motion by placing a curse on love, an act that allows him to acquire the power to rule the world means of forging a magical ring. In the last scene of that opera this ring of power is taken from him, and he curses it.

Related Topics:
Love - Nature - Freedom - Power - Civilization - Law

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Since its inception, the Ring has been subjected to a plethora of interpretations. George Bernard Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite, argues for a view of the Ring as an essentially socialist critique of industrial society and its abuses. Robert Donington in Wagner's Ring and its Symbols interprets it in terms of Jungian psychology as an account of the development of unconscious archetypes in the mind, leading towards individuation. Peter Kjaerulff, in The Ringbearers Diary, interprets the Ring as an attempt to expose a structure of ideas he refers to as The Cursed Ring, which he also links to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Plato's The Ring of Gyges.

Related Topics:
George Bernard Shaw - Socialist - Industrial society - Jungian psychology - Unconscious - Archetype - Individuation - Peter Kjaerulff - The Cursed Ring - J. R. R. Tolkien's - The Lord of the Rings - Plato - Ring of Gyges

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Music

Wagner was unsatisfied with the traditional structure of an opera as a series of distinct songs. In his previous operas, he had tried to disguise the song breaks as part of the music. For the Ring he decided to adopt a through-composed style, where each act of each opera would be a complete song with no breaks whatsoever.

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As a new foundation for his operas, Wagner adopted the use of what he called Grundthemen, or "base themes", but known since as leitmotifs (often shortened to "motive", "motiv" or "motif"), or simply as "themes". They are recurring melodies and/or harmonies, sometimes tied to a particular key and often to a particular orchestration, which denote musically an action, object, emotion, character or other subject mentioned in the text and/or presented onstage. While other composers before Wagner had already used leitmotifs, the Ring was unique in the extent to which he employed them, in their perfect expression of their subjects' essential characters (be they concrete, such as sword or spear, a person like Erda, or an abstract concept like "murder" or "love"), and in the ingeniousness of their combination and development.

Related Topics:
Leitmotif - Melodies - Harmonies - Key - Orchestration

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Any important subject is usually accompanied by a leitmotif, and there are long stretches of music which are constructed exclusively from them. There are dozens of motives spread through the Ring. They often occur as a musical reference to a presentation of their subject onstage, or to a reference in the text. Many of them appear in several operas, and some even in all four. Each of various aspects of several of the subjects are represented by their own leitmotif. Sometimes, as in the character of the Woodbird, a cluster of motives is associated with a single character.

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As the cycle progresses, and especially from the third act of Siegfried on, these motives are presented in increasingly sophisticated combinations. It is particularly telling when, as so often happens, they are used as a commentary, often ironic, on an action or a textual reference, or even simultaneously on each other. More particularly, the "system" of leitmotifs consists of close relationships between them, suggesting equivalent relationships between their subjects. A puzzling example is the similarity between the melodic contours of the Curse and the "Siegfried-as-hero" themes. And most importantly, Wagner used his father-in-law Franz Liszt's "metamorphosis of themes" technique to effect a dynamic development of many leitmotifs into quite different ones with a life all of their own. A clear example occurs in the transition from the first to the second scene of Das Rheingold, in which the musical theme associated with the ring of power transforms into that of Valhalla, Wotan's fortress intended as a base from which he as chief of the gods can impose his law on the world. The subject matter's parallellism is too obvious to require stating; what is worth mentioning is that the point is made by our conceptual association of the "ring" motive with its subject. No words are sung during the transition; the burden of the argument at that point is entirely musical. The most important result of this kind of technique is the setting up of an infinitely complex web of musico-conceptual associations which continues to provide material for discussion.

Related Topics:
Siegfried - Franz Liszt - Das Rheingold - Valhalla

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The advances in orchestration and tonality Wagner made in this work are of seminal importance in the history of Western music. He had arguably the best sense of orchestral sound of any Romantic composer; the huge Ring orchestra provided him with a palette of 17 different instrumental families (including the Wagner tuba, an instrument he invented to fill a gap he found between the tone qualities of the French horn and the trombone, as well as variations of existing instruments made for the operas, such as the bass trumpet and a contrabass trombone that used a double slide) which he could use singly or in any number of combinations to give infinite expression to the great range of emotions and events of the drama. For the same reason he weakened traditional tonality to the extent that most of the Ring, especially from Siegfried Act III onwards, cannot be said to be in "keys" as traditionally defined, but rather in "key areas", each of which flow smoothly into the following one. This fluidity, avoiding as it did a perceived need for the musical equivalent of "full stops"/"periods", was an integral component of the style that enabled Wagner to build the work's huge structures - Das Rheingold is an unbroken two-and-a-half hours long. Tonal indeterminacy was heightened by the vastly increased freedom with which he used dissonance. Simple major or minor (i.e. consonant) chords are rare in the Ring, and this work and his Tristan and Isolde are universally recognised as milestones on the way to Arnold Schoenberg's revolutionary break with the traditional concept of key and his rejection of consonance as the basis of an organising principle in music.

Related Topics:
Orchestration - Tonality - Romantic - Composer - Wagner tuba - Bass trumpet - Contrabass trombone - Das Rheingold - Chords - Tristan and Isolde - Arnold Schoenberg

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