Richard Wagner
(1813-1883)
On the 13th of August, 1876 in the small German town of Bayreuth, at the newly built Festspielhaus, the first complete cycle of Richard Wagner’s four-part music drama Der Ring des Nibelungen [The Ring of the Nibelung] opened with a performance of Das Rheingold [The Rhinegold].
Rhinegold was, in the composer’s view, a new type of work, bringing together all the arts (a Gesamtkunstwerk) and, in the process, ditching the traditional divisions of opera – aria, chorus, ensemble – in favour of continuous music and a system of constantly developing musical ideas associated with characters, objects or moods – the leitmotif. Hence the title of ‘music drama’ rather than opera.
Described as a Vorabend [literally a ‘pre-evening] Rheingold forms a one act, 2½ hour introduction to the three larger music dramas that follow (The Valkyrie, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung [Twilight of the Gods]) that followed.
The challenge of staging The Ring with its gods, dwarves, giants, dragons, etc., has produced many interesting (and sometimes distinctly odd) productions. Here are a few examples, taken from Das Rheingold.
The Prelude (136 bars of the chord of E-flat):
The Rhinemaidens and their gold:
The giants, Fafner and Fasolt:
Wotan and Loge descend to Nibelheim:
Loge tricks Alberich into turning himself into a snake and a toad:
Alberich curses the ring:
The Earth Goddess, Erde warns Wotan not to keep the Ring:
The gods cross over the Rainbow Bridge into Valhalla:
You can watch the whole music drama with English subtitles by clicking on:
Das Rheingold
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