The Wagner operas from Rienzi to Lohengrin have some foothold, however tenuous, in the historical world. They are given a geographical setting; they are placed in a particular era; and all but The Flying Dutchman incorporate historical characters (Rienzi, Wolfram von Eschenbach, King Henry the Fowler). With the Ring, Wagner makes his turn toward myth. He revisits history in Die Meistersinger, in which nothing remotely supernatural occurs, but for the most part he remains in the realm of myth and legend until the end. Nothing in his often confused and confusing body of theoretical prose is as cogent as his explanation of why he made this turn. He writes in Opera and Drama: “The incomparable thing about myth is that it is always true, and its content, through utmost compression, is inexhaustible for all time.” Wagner's enduring posthumous fame demonstrates the inexhaustibility of his mythical material.
The Dresden uprising of 1849 (Wagner not pictured).
A chronology shows how the emergence of the Ring idea was interwoven with the events of the day:
Feb. 22-26, 1848: Revolution in Paris; Louis-Philippe abdicates; Second Republic proclaimed.
Jan., 1849: Draft for Jesus of Nazareth.
March 13: Revolution begins in Vienna.
April 1: Wagner mentions a Siegfried opera.
May: National Assembly begins meeting in Frankfurt; Constituent Assembly meets in Paris.
June 16: Wagner delivers a fiery speech to Vaterlandsverein in Dresden.
June 23-25: Uprising in Paris.
Summer: Wagner writes “The Wibelungs," touching on Siegfried and the Holy Grail.
Oct-Nov: Writes “The Nibelung Myth,” drafts a libretto entitled Siegfried’s Death.
Early May: Wagner participates in Dresden uprising, flees on May 9.
May 27: Arrives in Switzerland.
May 31: The Frankfurt National Assembly dissolves, having failed to unify Germany.
June 2: Wagner arrives in Paris, returns to Zurich a month later.
Summer: Writes "Art and Revolution."
Nov.: Completes "The Artwork of the Future."
Aug., 1850: Writes “Judaism in Music,” sketches some music for Siegfried’s Tod.
Aug. 28: Premiere of Lohengrin in Weimar.
Sept.: Mentions the idea of a festival theater.
Feb., 1851: Completes Opera and Drama.
May-June: Drafts a libretto for a predecessor to Siegfried's Death, Young Siegfried.
Nov.: Drafts librettos for two further operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre.
Dec. 2: Louis-Napoléon seizes power in France, marking the end of the revolutionary era.
May, 1852: Publication of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Karl Marx's autopsy of the failed bourgeois revolution.
Dec. 15: Wagner finishes the Ring librettos, with Young Siegfried revised as Siegfried.
Not the least remarkable thing about this four-year elaboration of the Ring plan is that it grew ever more expansive even as Wagner's career prospects narrowed and his world shrank inward. Ideas of making another stab at Paris went nowhere; hopes for an amnesty for his revolutionary activity were dashed; financial difficulties became severe, despite a growing number of performances of his earlier works. In the relative isolation of his Zurich exile he somehow formed the idea of a work so vast that a new kind of theater would be required to perform it.
The world of the Ring is peopled by mythical-legendary creatures — gods, dwarves, giants, Valkyries, Rhinemaidens — as well as by men and women, who move to the fore in Die Walküre and dominate the stage in Götterdämmerung. The chain of events that leads to Siegfried's death, Wagner's point of origin, begins in Walküre, when the twin siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde meet, fall in love, and generate the ill-fated hero. Walküre also introduces us to Brünnhilde, the rebellious Valkyrie, who will bring the cycle to a fiery end. The three big operas of the cycle, Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, are grand-scaled psychological dramas, pivoting on an extraordinary series of one-on-one exchanges. Das Rheingold, by contrast, is an ensemble piece, fairly dense with action, enlivened by comedy, pointed in its use of political allegory. It spells with piercing clarity the dominant theme of the cycle: the greed for gold and power is a corrupting force, demanding the forswearing of love. Wagner took note of the fact that the tetralogies of ancient Greek theater consisted of three tragedies plus a satyr play; here the satyr play, the comedy, comes first.
Hans Thoma, "Wotan's Head," 1896.
The entire saga turns, famously, on a real-estate deal gone awry. Wotan, chief of the gods, has commissioned the two giants, Fasolt and Fafner, to build the palace of Valhalla. Furious at not having been paid, the giants seize the goddess Freia, whose golden apples give the gods eternal life. Facing calamity, Wotan must find another means of payment. From Loge, the world-traveling god of fire, he hears of the events that unfold in the opening scene of Rheingold: Alberich, the Nibelung dwarf, has taken the magic gold from the river Rhine and forged from it a ring that confers supreme power. Wotan and Loge descend to Nibelheim, the dwarves' realm, and trick Alberich into giving up the ring. Alberich answers by placing a curse upon the trinket: all who wield it will become enslaved to it. Wotan shrugs this off, but the curse quickly goes to work: when the ring and the rest of the gold hoard are given to the giants, they begin to fight over it, and Fafner kills Fasolt. Wotan has at least won his short-term goal of winning back Freia, and with an air of ill-earned triumph leads the gods across a rainbow bridge into Valhalla. The Rhinemaidens plead in vain for the gold's return: "Only down deep is it trusty and true: / false and base is the revelry above!" The gods laugh.
Returning to Opera North's superb concert video of Rheingold, we can align some key musical moments to stages of the drama. At 5:20, the Rhinemaidens enter, cavorting in the waters. Alberich enters at 6:40, darkening and roughening the musical texture. Much chasing and teasing ensues. Then, at 15:45, the sun shines into the water, revealing the hoard of gold. The Rhinemaidens make the fatal mistake of telling Alberich that from the gold a ring of ultimate can be forged — the broken circle of the Ring motif sounds at 19:25 — and that only one who forswears love can wield the gold's power. The motif of the Renunciation of Love makes its ominous entrance at 20:11. Alberich follows through, cursing love and taking the gold. During the subsequent orchestral transition to Scene 2, the Renunciation motif sounds again (25:05), followed by the Ring, which grows more luminous and ethereal as it is repeated. We are rising to the godly realm of Valhalla, yet the motifs of lovelessness and the lust for power remain tellingly in play. Indeed, when the majestic theme of Valhalla emerges (26:57), it has evolved seamlessly out of the Ring material. An identity between the worlds of Alberich and Wotan is established even before the latter character has appeared.
In Wotan's dialogue with Fricka, one of the cycle's dominant motifs, that of Wotan's spear and the contracts engraved in it, makes its first appearance, rather quietly (30:28). Below is a more stentorian version of it, followed by subsequent appearances in Siegfried (the breaking of the spear at the hands of the headstrong hero) and Götterdämmerung (where Alberich's son Hagen threatens to subsume Wotan's authority).
From Clemens Krauss's 1953 Ring at Bayreuth (Pristine).
During the COVID-19 shutdown, the bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, the mezzo Jamie Barton, and the pianist Kathleen Kelly created a marvelous modern-dress, homebound staging of the Wotan-Fricka dialogue, with the god's eye-patch transformed into a sleep mask and the splendors of Valhalla displayed in a Zillow real-estate listing. Look closely on Wotan's laptop and you will see "Invoice from Giants."
The descent into Nibelheim is Wagner at his most sonically relentless, with the upper realm harmony collapsing into endless hammering rhythm. Here is a spectacular visualization by La Fura dels Baus, at Valenica in 2007:
After Wotan tricks Alberich into giving up the Ring, the dwarf delivers his terrifying curse — "the lord of the ring as the slave of the ring." Eric Owens gave an extraordinary rendition of this monologue at the Met in 2010; the motif of the curse is heard at 0:36, the crucial line "The lord of the ring as the slave of the ring" at 3:34.
Wotan uses the gold hoard to pay off the giants. With great reluctance he parts with the Ring as well, at which point the earth goddess Erda rises from the depths and warns Wotan of impending doom: "All that is, ends."
Maria von Ilosvay and Hans Hotter in Clemens Krauss's 1953 Ring at Bayreuth (Pristine).
With Fafner's killing of Fasolt, the cosmically chilling motif of the curse is heard again:
Ludwig Weber in Clemens Krauss's 1953 Ring at Bayreuth (Pristine).
Once the god Donner summons a clearing storm with a blow of his hammer, the rainbow bridge to Valhalla appears, and Wotan has an arioso moment with "Abendlich strahlt die Sonne Auge" ("The sun's eye gleams in the evening"). Thomas Stewart sings it nobly in Herbert von Karajan's somewhat kitschy filmed production of the opera:
At 1:50, as Wotan hails his new fortress, we hear the last new motif in the opera, one that will also resound throughout the cycle: the gleaming theme of the sword. The god seems already to be imagining a sword-wielding human hero who can back the Ring — a sign that he has absorbed nothing from Erda's unearthly communication. Finally, after mordant asides by Loge ("They are hurrying to their end"), comes the gods' ironically glorious entry into the palace, with the sword motif ringing in the orchestra and the Rhinemaidens singing their lament ("Only down deep is it trusty and true").
From Wilhelm Furtwängler's 1950 Ring at La Scala (Pristine).
