Author: Saskia Dittrich
ca. 6 minutes
Wagner called Das Rheingold the “preliminary evening” of his Ring cycle — but there is nothing tentative about it. In one uninterrupted sweep, it establishes the cycle’s musical language, dramatic architecture and technical scale. Its demands ranged from new orchestral instruments to on-stage swimming machines. Seven stories trace the work’s beginnings.
1. Written backwards, composed forwards
Richard Wagner’s original intention was to write a single opera about the radiant hero Siegfried. He had already drafted an initial libretto for Siegfried’s Death at the age of 35. Yet no sooner had he begun than it became clear to him: the audience could not possibly grasp the full drama without an adequate prehistory — and that prehistory, in turn, would surely need a prehistory of its own … and so on. The result is substantial: Der Ring des Nibelungen comprises three full-length operas and a “preliminary evening”.
When it came to composition, however, Wagner proceeded in the opposite direction — forwards: from Das Rheingold through Die Walküre and Siegfried to Götterdämmerung. He devoted 26 years to this monumental cycle, produced some 700 handwritten pages of libretto, and bequeathed to posterity — depending on the conductor — up to 16 hours of music drama. Even Wagner, himself no stranger to self-aggrandisement, might have been surprised by the degree to which his work became the stuff of legend.
2. Timeless truths
Thieving dwarves, knights arriving in swan boats, and singers consorting with divinities: Richard Wagner had absolutely no interest in realism. But why? Whilst his Italian contemporaries — Giacomo Puccini and Giuseppe Verdi, for instance — preferred to draw their characters from real life (consumptive courtesans, lovelorn artists, or desperate single parents), Wagner turned instead to myth and ancient legend. In his programmatic essay Opera and Drama, he argues that myths distil the human condition to a timeless essence: it is only through estrangement that the eternal becomes visible.
His theory is strong. Even the opening scene of Rheingold feels, on closer inspection, disconcertingly familiar. The misery of history begins — naturally — with a bruised male ego. A small man, Alberich, leers at the three Rhinemaidens, who are perfectly content with their swimming routine and who guard a treasure with less-than-exemplary diligence. But that, for the moment, is beside the point. Hapless and joyless, Alberich attempts to flirt with Flosshilde, Woglinde and Wellgunde in turn — apparently indifferent as to which of the three he might ultimately win over.
Instead of taking their rejections to heart and reflecting on his attitudes towards women and masculinity, Alberich draws a radical conclusion: in wounded defiance, he renounces love forever, instead staking everything on the acquisition of power — through the legendary Rhinegold. Where injured pride holds sway, the reach for ruthless dominion is seldom far behind. Anyone who fails to recognise the parallels with contemporary crises and autocrats may, perhaps, be better off with Puccini and Verdi.
3. An unwanted world première
In August 1869, the young Bavarian King Ludwig II finally lost his patience: “An end must swiftly be put to the worthless and wholly unpardonable intrigues of Wagner and his associates. I hereby issue the express command that the performance take place on Sunday.” With these words, the monarch commanded the world première of Rheingold in Munich — overriding the explicit wishes of his revered composer.
Wagner himself had harboured far grander ambitions: his four-part operatic epic Der Ring des Nibelungen was to be premièred in its entirety and as a unified whole — though the final two parts were not yet complete. Wagner was, moreover, so deeply dissatisfied with the rehearsals that he repeatedly petitioned the King for a postponement, at times resorting to time-wasting and obtuse tactics. All to no avail. The première took place — albeit without the offended Wagner in the audience.
The dream of a complete Ring cycle would have to wait a few years longer, until Wagner could realise it himself: in the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, built expressly for the purpose — and generously funded by a loan from the King.
4. 136 bars of E flat major
Richard Wagner’s operas took the large-scale ambitions of French grand opera in a new direction, expanding the genre’s scope, duration and orchestral demands. Yet beyond the megalomania, even the opening bars of Rheingold make it clear that something here is different, bolder — and, indeed, brilliant. The Prelude depicts the creation of the world, and that creation begins in the double basses. At first, one can scarcely hear anything at all: the deep E flat intoned by the basses is felt in the pit of the stomach rather than perceived by the ear. In the fifth bar, the bass clarinet enters, followed in due course by the horns. Over a remarkable 136 bars, Wagner builds a monumental E flat major chord — a primordial musical continent — before the Rhinemaidens are finally permitted to sing.
It is a remarkable inspiration, and Wagner — ever the gifted self-promoter — furnished it with a suitably compelling origin story in his memoirs. According to his own account, the idea came to him during a journey to Italy, under the combined influence of homesickness, an unsettled stomach from dubious ice cream, and acute sleep deprivation: “I sank into a kind of somnambulant state, in which I suddenly had the sensation of being submerged in a swiftly flowing current of water. Its rushing soon presented itself to my musical sense in the form of the chord of E flat major, surging incessantly in broken figurations; these figurations appeared as melodic passages of increasing motion, yet the pure triad of E flat major never changed, and by its persistence seemed to impart infinite significance to the element in which I was sinking.”
5. Six harps, eighteen anvils and wagner tubas
A work of operatic grandeur requires not only a timeless drama and flashes of genius — it also calls for the right instruments, and the right number of them. Six harps, for instance, are deployed to make the Rhinegold shimmer with suitably musical lustre. When the action later descends into the subterranean realm of Nibelheim — Alberich’s domain and the site of the gold mines — Wagner pulls out all the stops: eighteen anvils are pressed into service as percussion instruments. And as if the repurposing of blacksmiths’ tools were not inventive enough, Wagner devised an entirely new instrument.
He conceived the Wagner tuba in the summer of 1853, during his exile in Zurich, while working on Das Rheingold. He had a specific sound in mind for the Valhalla motif — one that the existing brass instruments were simply unable to provide. Since a new instrument — a process that would require the assistance of a horn-player and several instrument-makers — cannot be conjured up, built and tested overnight, it was a considerable time before the first Wagner tuba was ready. It was not ready in time for the world première in Munich.
6. A vertiginous swimming machine
“When we arrived in Bayreuth on 3 June 1876, we saw our swimming machines for the first time. Good heavens! A heavy, triangular contraption — an iron rod certainly 20 feet high, with an angled lattice frame at the top; and into that we were supposed to climb and sing!” So recalls Lili Lehmann, one of the first Rhinemaidens, of her arrival at the festival venue in Bayreuth.
In the realm of stage technology, too, Wagner set standards that were ambitious: in Bayreuth, the Rhinemaidens were to float and sway aloft, creating the perfect illusion of swimming, singing mermaids. The account of the first trial run on the “swimming machine” makes for suitably thrilling reading: “So I climbed up. I soon found it quite delightful — first I moved my arms, as my entire upper body was free and there was nothing to hold on to — then my whole body as well. Eventually Minna Lammert also plucked up the courage to try the swimming test, and soon we were swimming and singing away to our hearts’ content.”
Wagner himself, reportedly overcome with paternal pride and the intoxication of the stage, is said to have embraced the newly appointed Rhinemaidens with tears of joy after the successful rehearsal. Yet the initial elation had its limits: shortly before the première, Lili Lehmann and her fellow Rhinemaidens were informed that, to complete the illusion, they would each be required to wear a mermaid’s tail on their legs.
7. A compass for the emotions
No account of Wagner would be complete without mention of the leitmotif — or rather, the leitmotifs, for there are a great many of them. Few musical concepts are more closely associated with any composer than this one. In his Ring, Wagner brought the art of the recurring musical motif to a state of perfection: for virtually everything of dramatic significance — character, object, mood or metaphysical idea — he composed a distinct musical identifying theme.
For a contemporary reference, consider the Imperial March from Star Wars; composer John Williams reached directly into Wagner’s toolbox. In the Ring, more than 100 leitmotifs are woven into the score.
The word Leitmotiv did not, in fact, originate with Wagner himself — he preferred more poetic terms, such as Erinnerungsmotiv (”reminiscence motif”) or the rather charming Gefühlswegweiser (”compass for the emotions”). The term caught on regardless, and Wagner did not object.
There were precursors to the technique. Berlioz used the idée fixe in Symphonie fantastique, and Weber also worked with recurring musical ideas in Der Freischütz. Wagner, however, developed the principle more systematically than his predecessors and made it a defining element of his musical dramaturgy.