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 While he wrote over
50 overtures, marches, choral works, piano pieces, songs, etc., together
with dozens of literary works, Wagner is remembered mainly for his ten
operas. None is more important than his monumental music drama Der Ring
des Nibelungen. For the benefit of any Bikwil readers who aren’t
familiar with the work, I have been challenged by the editor to sketch
some sort of intro. But in one page? Fat chance! There’s not room here
to summarise even a tenth of its plot. (If you need a hint of what it‘s
all about, just think lust for power, wealth and sex for openers, and
universal murder, suicide and destruction for closers, with a bit of
gratuitous redemption thrown in for good measure.)
So what I‘ve
decided to do is relate six fabulous “Guinness-Book-of-Records-type”
facts about the work and then hope for the best as I scurry for cover.
The gargantuan Ring
consists of not one but four operas — Das Rheingold, Die
Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung — which
require the audience to attend on four evenings for a total of 15 to 16
hours of music
Wagner worked on it
over a period of more than 25 years (1848-74)
He wrote not only
the music, but also the libretto (as he did for his other operas)
It required a
special theatre to be built for it — the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth
The demands placed
on the lead singers by Wagner (e.g. Brünnhilde and particularly Siegfried)
are the most unmerciful in all opera
It has 27 principal
singing roles, plus 40 extra parts, a chorus of over 80 and the voices of
about a dozen children — to say nothing of an orchestra up to
110-strong.
Enough of the
statistics, mirabile dictu though they may be. Let us now — to
the reverberating strains of a passage from The Cambridge Music Guide
(1985) — proceed over the rainbow bridge to Bikwil’s own
tribute:
The Ring is
Wagner’s greatest achievement; it has even been claimed, not
unreasonably, as the greatest achievement of Western culture, so huge is
its scale, so wide-ranging the issues it deals with, so profoundly unified
is it on so many planes. It is based on ancient sagas: Wagner believed, as
others have done too, that the truths embodied in myths have meanings far
beyond any literal interpretation. The story of the Ring is about
gods, dwarves (Nibelungs), giants and humans; it has been read (and
performed) as a manifesto for socialism, as a plea for a Nazi-like
racialism, as a study of the workings of the human psyche, as forecast of
the fate of the world and humankind, as a parable about the new industrial
society of Wagner’s time. It is all of these, and much more too. It
touches at some point on every kind of human relationship and on numerous
moral and philosophical issues. It is inevitably the focus of all debate
on Wagner’s greatness and the meaning of his works.
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