Fifteen hours, four nights, one cursed golden ring
Richard Wagner spent roughly twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874, writing both words and score for Der Ring des Nibelungen—four German music dramas he called a stage festival play. A full cycle runs about fifteen hours across four evenings, and the Bayreuth premiere in 1876 opened with Das Rheingold on 13 August.
Wagner framed the cycle as a Vorabend plus three days: Das Rheingold as preliminary evening, then Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. Parts can stand alone because dialogue recalls earlier events, yet he meant them performed in series. The story tracks gods, heroes, and mythical beings contending for a ring that confers world dominion, across three generations until Valhalla burns. The Nibelung of the title is the dwarf Alberich, who forges the ring from Rhinegold he stole—so the English sense is really Alberich's ring.
Scale matches ambition. Rheingold is continuous music, typically about two and a half hours without interval; Götterdämmerung can approach five hours excluding breaks. Wagner modelled the design on Greek drama's three tragedies plus a satyr play. He built the Bayreuth Festspielhaus so a vast orchestra—enlarged brass with Wagner tuba, bass trumpet, and contrabass trombone—could blend under the stage while singers kept a natural volume. Chorus appears only briefly, mostly in Götterdämmerung.
Sources fuse Norse and German legend: Edda material feeds Rheingold; Die Walküre leans on the Völsunga saga; Siegfried mixes Eddur, Völsunga, and Thidrekssaga; Götterdämmerung draws on the twelfth-century Nibelungenlied. Recurring musical ideas—leitmotifs, though Wagner preferred "guides-to-feeling"—link characters, objects, and emotions the way a Greek chorus once framed drama. Shaw read the cycle as industrial critique; Donington as Jungian individuation. Anthony Freud called staging it opera's highest challenge.
Source: Der Ring des Nibelungen
