On the afternoon of 5 September 1853, Richard Wagner slumped exhausted on a couch at his hotel in La Spezia, Italy, where he had gone for mental and musical recuperation.
Restless and feverish the night before, he had set out on a long walk in the hills that morning, hoping that a period of deep, restful sleep might follow. It didn’t. Instead Wagner ‘slipped into a kind of drowsy state’, suddenly feeling as though he were ‘sinking into swiftly flowing water’. From its rushing noise the chord of E flat major emerged ‘in broken forms’, transforming into ‘increasingly animated melodic figurations’.
Wagner woke 'in sudden terror'
Imagining 'the waves were rushing high above my head’, Wagner woke ‘in sudden terror’ from his dream. He immediately knew that something momentous had happened. ‘I at once recognised,’ he later wrote, ‘that the orchestral prelude to Rheingold, which I had been carrying within me without being able to precisely locate it, had finally risen to the surface.’
The sounds that Wagner heard in his state of semi-slumber eventually became the opening of his epic, four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. But these were mere snippets compared to the mammoth task that lay ahead. Four full-length operatic librettos, written by Wagner himself, sat waiting for music to fill them.
Their subject matter took the German Medieval poem the Nibelungenlied as a starting-point. And it involved a sweeping analysis of human history, from prelapsarian innocence to the rapacious power struggles and despoliation of nature which Wagner saw in the 19th-century world around him.
How had this calamitous decline happened? Was humanity hurtling towards unavoidable disaster, or was there hope to be found? Intended to answer these questions, and cast on an unprecedentedly ambitious scale, the completed Ring cycle would eventually stretch to 15 hours of music.
'A task such as had faced no other composer in the history of music’
No wonder, then, that the 40-year-old Wagner had been suffering writer’s block before experiencing his La Spezia Rheingold vision. ‘He had before him a task,’ Wagner biographer Ernest Newman commented, ‘such as had faced no other composer in the whole history of music.’
- See where Wagner placed in our list of the 50 greatest composers of all time
Wagner’s initial intentions had been far more modest. He had originally conceived just a single opera entitled Siegfrieds Tod (‘Siegfried’s Death’), for which he completed a draft libretto in 1848. Wagner was at that time heavily involved in politics, taking part in the abortive Dresden uprising of 1849 against the king’s authority in Saxony.
There are clear parallels between Wagner’s revolutionary activities and the cataclysmic events depicted in the Ring operas, where the god Wotan’s authority is fatally undermined by his own double-dealing and corruption, and his established fiefdom perishes in a massive conflagration. At the heart of Siegfrieds Tod is its eponymous hero, an ordinary mortal whom the god Wotan, his grandfather, hopes can re-possess for him a priceless golden ring conferring power on those who wield it.
- Three Wagner operas (including one of the Ring Cycle) made it into our 20 greatest operas ever
A cosmic game of thrones
As Wagner pondered the significance of this cosmic game of thrones, where Siegfried dangles like a pawn between the once almighty Wotan and the mortals who oppose him, the need to ask more questions about his hero developed. Where did Siegfried come from? What were his youth and young manhood like? Why does Wotan need to use him as an intermediary, and what exactly makes the golden ring so all-important?
To answer these questions Wagner delved back into the Nibelung myth, eventually deciding that two further three-act operas, plus a one-act Vorabend (‘Preliminary Evening’) would be needed to properly contextualise Siegfried’s story and plumb the motivations of those involved in the frequently bloody struggle to control the ring. And so the final format of Der Ring des Nibelungen was set – four separate but interconnected music dramas (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung), for performance on four different evenings but fully comprehensible only as a complete cycle.
Getting the Ring’s overall structure right was one thing: composing the gargantuan amount of music it required quite another. All told, it took Wagner over 20 years to do it. By November 1853 he was ready to start drafting the score of Das Rheingold, concerning how the golden ring originated, and the curse it carried.
Was it all simply too ambitious?
By 1857, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre and Acts I and II ofSiegfried had been substantially completed, but serious doubts were festering in Wagner’s mind about the overall viability of the Ring project. Was it all simply too ambitious? In so dramatically stretching the boundaries of what opera was capable of expressing was he actually making the cycle ‘unstageable and unsingable’, as some of his friends suspected?
A hiatus of nearly 12 years followed, in which it was uncertain whether Act III of Siegfried and all of Götterdämmerung would ever be written. In that period, however, Wagner was anything but inactive. Aware that his last premiere had been Lohengrin in 1850, he set about re-establishing his credentials with the opera-going public and the critics.
Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg were the result, one a wrenching tragedy of erotic attraction, the other a comedy spiked with unmistakable poignancy. Staged in 1865 and ’68 respectively, both were remarkable demonstrations of the burgeoning creative resources that Wagner now wielded.
These are clearly signalled in the glowering prelude to Act III of Siegfried, where a new weight of utterance and a formidable self-confidence can be heard. Wagner re-commenced work on Siegfried early in 1869, finishing it two years later.
The power of the Wagnerian leitmotif
For much of that period he was also working on Götterdämmerung, by now in complete command of the techniques he had developed to bind the Ring together as a single entity. Chief among these was Wagner’s use of leitmotifs (‘leading’ or ‘guiding’ motives): melodies, like musical taglines, which he attached to particular objects, ideas or characters in the Ring operas.
The ring itself has one, as do Valhalla and Wotan’s spear, and there are dozens of others. Intertwining and developing these strands of stem cell material, Wagner eked out detailed nuances of psychological insight, illuminating the motivation of the gods, demigods, mermaids, dwarfs, giants and ordinary human beings who people the Ring cycle.
The use of advanced harmonies, stretching the conventional relationship between particular keys and chords, was also crucial in Wagner’s search for new shades of expression and paved the path to the atonality later explored by Schoenberg and his successors. Together, leitmotifs and harmonic innovations helped Wagner ensure each act of the Ring was durchkomponiert (‘through-composed’), with no discrete arias or artificial gaps for applause between them. One scene runs seamlessly into another in a single arc of dramaturgical development.
'An astonishing display of compositional mastery'
All these elements come spectacularly together in Götterdämmerung’s concluding pages, where a tumultuous cascade of leitmotifs from earlier in the cycle is recalled by Wagner as Valhalla burns and the gods burn with it. It is an astonishing display of compositional mastery, and in the comments Wagner inscribed on the score’s final page a palpable sigh of relief can be heard, spiced with a touch of irony. ‘Completed in Wahnfried on 21 November 1874,’ he wrote. ‘I will say no more!!’
Wahnfried was the house which Wagner and his family – wife Cosima and their children Isolde, Eva and Siegfried – now occupied in Bayreuth, a small Bavarian town 150 miles north of Munich. They had first moved to Bayreuth two years earlier, intending to launch a Wagner festival where the Ring could be performed in its totality.
At the insistence of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a longtime Wagner benefactor, premieres of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre had already been mounted in Munich in 1869 and ’70. But Wagner knew that for the four Ring operas to have their full cumulative effect, they must be staged together in sequence, in a production supervised by himself.
Why a brand new masterpiece needed... a brand new theatre
After briefly considering the Baroque Markgräfliches Opernhaus in Bayreuth as a venue, the decision was made to build a brand-new Festspielhaus (‘festival theatre’) on land donated by the local council. A foundation stone was laid on Der Grüne Hügel (‘The Green Hill’) on 22 May, 1872, and for much of the next three years Wagner was embroiled in fund-raising activities, eventually relying on King Ludwig for a substantial line of credit to complete the project.
Various bespoke innovations made the new theatre special. To keep visual distractions to a minimum, the orchestra pit was sunk beneath the stage, invisible to the audience’s eye. A wooden hood shielded the conductor from view and, by moderating the amount of orchestral sound entering the arena, helped singers to be heard more clearly.
Seating was raked in amphitheatre style, providing clear sightlines for all spectators. The auditorium itself, lined mainly with wood to maximise its acoustic properties, would be darkened during performances, further focusing attention on the stage action.
'Wagner supervised every detail of the production'
These departures from conventional opera house design were, Wagner said, to create ‘a new and different relation to the stage spectacle’ for the audience, a more direct and intimate connection than was possible in any other theatre. Would his theory prove right? Would the complete Der Ring des Nibelungen shake and stir audiences as Wagner intended? As final preparations for the inaugural staging began in May 1876 – extensive rehearsals had also taken place the previous summer – these questions hung in the air unanswered.
Wagner himself supervised every detail of the production, coaching singers, directing onstage action and overseeing costumes, props and scenery. ‘He spoke, sang and mimed like the most experienced of actors… governed by the surest instinct for beauty,’ one observer wrote. As Ernest Newman later noted, ‘Only a man of inexhaustible energy and superhuman courage could have carried the burden of those months without breaking down.’
Who conducted the first performance of the Ring Cycle?
Finally, the Ring cycle was ready, and on 13, 14, 16 and 17 August 1876 the first ever sequential performance of the four operas was given, with both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung receiving their world premieres. Hans Richter conducted, and there were two further performances of the complete cycle before the first Bayreuth Festival ended on 30 August.
After the last Götterdämmerung, Wagner gave a short speech thanking the artists, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘And now that we must part, a heartfelt farewell!’, he said. Wagner would never see the Ring on Bayreuth’s stage again – the next production there would be 20 years later, 13 years after his death in 1883.
Deafening applause... and a shattered composer
Among those attending the first festival were the German Emperor Wilhelm I, King Ludwig II, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and the composers Franz Liszt, Anton Bruckner, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The applause when the last note of the cycle sounded was reportedly deafening.
But Wagner, physically and emotionally exhausted, was plagued by the inevitable imperfections in the performances. ‘I know now that I and my work have no place in these times of ours,’ he lamented. Wagner’s wife, Cosima, noted in her diary: ‘R. is very sad, says he wishes he could die!’
It was soon clear, however, that the impact of the Ring’s premiere had been profound, stirring debate in Germany and beyond. Inevitably, the cycle divided opinion, some thrilling to its epic scale and highly potent music, others recoiling from what they viewed as the work’s grandiloquence. Arguments pro and contra Wagner could be vitriolic. ‘The wars of religion were not more bloodthirsty,’ George Bernard Shaw wryly reported, ‘than the discussions of the Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians.’
A hugely divisive work
Shaw himself was one of the earliest commentators to offer a coherent interpretation of what the Ring was ‘about’, in his book The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Framing the cycle as a devastating indictment of capitalist society, he saw in it ‘the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today.’ The Industrial Revolution had, he argued, impoverished humans and their spirit. The Ring’s mythic tale of power-lust and greed for riches showed this process clearly and warned about its catastrophic consequences.
Composers, though not impervious to the Ring’s ideological messages, were generally more focused on absorbing its musical innovations. Wagner’s expanded orchestra – ‘a vast sonorous instrument of unparalleled power and flexibility,’ one scholar calls it – spawned the sumptuous scores of Richard Strauss and Mahler, among others. Even those who balked at ‘Wagner fever’ were affected – Debussy, for instance, whose opera Pelléas et Mélisande is suffused with Wagnerian touches.
'Star Wars – a nine-film cycle of distinctly Ring-like proportions'
In literature, both Marcel Proust and James Joyce co-opted elements of the Ring’s leitmotif technique into their writing. TS Eliot’s poetry is flecked with Wagner allusions, as are the novels of Thomas Mann and DH Lawrence. The Ring’s leitmotif system also had an enormous influence on the development of film music, linking onscreen characters to specific emotions, thoughts and motivations.
Classic film scores by Erich Korngold and Franz Waxman feast on Wagner’s orchestral palette. So, too, do the resplendent, widescreen sonorities of the American composer John Williams’s music for the iconic Star Wars movies – a nine-film cycle of distinctly Ring-like proportions.
Are we right to link Wagner and Hitler?
The Ring, and other Wagner operas, unfortunately also attracted more sinister admirers. A young Adolf Hitler professed himself ‘addicted’ to Wagner’s music, convinced that it provided a compelling template for German national superiority. Hitler attended the Bayreuth Festival regularly in the 1930s, as did many Nazi soldiers, sparking lingering suspicions that Wagner’s works somehow encouraged despotism, allowing the extreme cruelty of the Holocaust to happen.
These issues are still hotly debated today. Where the Ring cycle itself is concerned, however, it can be safely concluded that Hitler had only a superficial grasp of its content. ‘Anyone familiar with the Ring,’ the American composer John Adams has written, ‘knows that the marriage of capitalism and fascism that underlies Nazi ideology is utterly at odds with Wagner’s anarchic societal vision.’
Why the Ring 'anticipates the political turmoil of recent times'
That vision – of a world in thrall to greed, environmental vandalism and violent power-wrestling – has particular resonance today. The Ring operas, Washington Post columnist Michael Dirda wrote in 2020, ‘seem to anticipate the political turmoil of recent times, as they track the thefts and shady deals that lie behind excessive wealth, the ethical impairment resulting from the hunger for power, the heartless exploitation of an underclass, murderous intergenerational conflicts, the flouting of sexual prohibitions and, more than anything else, repeated betrayals of trust’.
Wagner himself continued to think about what he had created in the Ring to the end of his life. The night before he died, aged 69, in Venice, he played the Rhinemaidens’ beautiful song from the conclusion of Das Rheingold on the piano, and mused on the lament they sing: ‘Only here in the depths are goodness and truth: false and base is all that exists up above!’
Three decades had passed since those words had been written. ‘Extraordinary that I saw this so clearly at that time!,’ Wagner commented. ‘They are very dear to me, these subservient creatures of the deep, with all their yearning.’
Plain speaking: ten opinions on Wagner
‘Monsieur Wagner has good moments, but awful quarters of an hour!’ Gioachino Rossini
‘I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says’ Oscar Wilde
‘Richard Wagner is the most violently controversial artist known to history’ Wilhelm Furtwängler
‘Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since’ Stephen Hawking
‘It does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts’ Mark Twain
‘He is one of those musicians who can persuade even the unmusical to listen to music’ Thomas Mann
‘After the last notes of Götterdämmerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison’ Pyotr Tchaikovsky
‘Most of us are so helplessly under the spell of his greatness that we can do nothing but go raving about the theatre in ecstasies of deluded admiration’ George Bernard Shaw
‘Sit in the dark for four days in company with people who are not quite normal and you will no doubt be reduced to an abnormal condition and be enchanted by absurdities’ Leo Tolstoy
‘I understand perfectly when a musician says today: “I hate Wagner, but I can no longer endure any other music”’ Friedrich Nietzsche