Here's our guide to the storyline of Das Rheingold, the first part of Richard Wagner's epic, masterful Ring Cycle.
What is the story of Das Rheingold?
Composed: 1853-4 Premiered: 22 September 1869, Munich
At the bottom of the River Rhine, the dwarf Alberich steals the Rhine gold from the Rhinemaidens, who have revealed that whoever can create a ring from it will inherit the world. Meanwhile, up in the mountains, Wotan finds himself in trouble. He has to hand his daughter Freia over to the giants Fafner and Fasolt as the promised payment for building his castle.
The giants agree to accept the Rhine gold in her place. So, Wotan and his sidekick Loge head to Alberich’s cave to get it. They succeed but, alas, Alberich has cursed the ring and whoever should own it…
How did Wagner begin the Ring Cycle?
All of Wagner’s operas from Das Rheingold onwards are investigations, the composer directing the unique array of artistic resources that constituted his genius into the questions: What makes civilisation possible? What price is it necessary for us to pay to be members of a civilised community?
After the abortive revolution of 1849, he spent the next 12 years in exile. So, he quickly realised that the decadent society in which he felt he lived wasn’t to be easily overthrown.
For the first four years of exile Wagner wrote no music. He did, however, produce an immense amount of theoretical writing. This included his essays Artwork and the Future and Judaism in Music in which he tried to work out the relationship between art and society. He also found himself driven to producing the text of a work which was originally going to be a single drama, but which ended up as four, as he worked backwards and realised the extent of his subject. And so began the Ring cycle.
What are the themes of Das Rheingold?
The first drama is Das Rheingold, in which Nature, in its calm and sometimes stormy grandeur, is depicted at the extraordinary opening by music evoking the depths of the Rhine. These 156 bars begin with an almost inaudibly low and quiet note, and gradually become the majestically flowing river.
This idyll of peace is soon disrupted by the dwarf Alberich’s attempted seduction of the Rhinemaidens. And, when they elude him, he steals the Rhine gold, which, made into the Ring, would give him world power. Alberich is Desire at its crudest and least attractive. His chief opponents, meanwhile, are the gods, who already possess power. They, however, are hopelessly morally compromised, the chief one, Wotan, having struck a bargain which he can’t possibly keep.
What is the message of the opera?
Das Rheingold, we soon see, is a bitter and often compassionate satire on politics. Wotan is shown, like many politicians, to have high ideals but to be unable to realise them without violating the rules by which he governs the world, or would like to.
There are long debates among Rheingold’s antagonists, set to a kind of music previously unheard, in which what Wagner called ‘unending melody’ is underpinned by ‘leading motifs’ or leitmotifs – short thematic fragments which can be endlessly varied and combined. Many of these can safely be named as, for instance, the Ring, the Rhine, the power of love.
Das Rheingold remains, at two and a half hours, the longest single stretch of unbroken music in the Western world. It's where Wagner sets out all the basic issues which the rest of the Ring will explore.
What is the order of the Ring Cycle?
After Das Rheingold opens the saga, the next in the sequence of the Ring Cycle is Die Walküre (The Valkyries). We named this one of the 20 greatest operas of all time.
The third in the sequence is Siegfried, sometimes described as the Ring's scherzo. And we end with the epic, dramatic Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).