Wagner wrote his Valkyrie story third but placed it second in the Ring
Richard Wagner planned his Ring cycle backwards. He began with the hero's death, then kept adding earlier chapters to explain it, so Die Walkure, the Valkyrie, was the third libretto he wrote yet sits second in the sequence. He wanted it staged only with the full cycle, but his royal patron had other ideas.
The project started in October 1848 with a prose outline called Siegfried's Death. Deciding one drama could not hold the story, Wagner prefaced it with Siegfried's youth, then with Die Walkure to explain the hero's origins, and finally with the prologue Das Rheingold. He announced a festival where the three dramas and their prelude would be played over three days and an evening. The Walkure text was finished by mid-1852, and he composed the music, in performance order this time, by March 1856. His first title was the clunky Siegfried and Sieglinde: The Valkyrie Punished.
The plot comes from the Volsunga saga and the Poetic Edda. Siegmund, wounded and fleeing, shelters in a house built around a huge ash tree, where a sword is buried to the hilt. Its owner's wife, Sieglinde, turns out to be his long-lost twin; he pulls out the sword, and the two fall in love. The goddess Fricka demands punishment, pointing out to Wotan that his son is no free hero but a pawn, and Wotan reluctantly abandons him. His Valkyrie daughter Brunnhilde, moved by Siegmund's devotion, disobeys and tries to save him. Wotan shatters the sword with his spear, and Siegmund falls, while Brunnhilde escapes with the pregnant Sieglinde and the sword's fragments, telling her to name the child Siegfried.
The third act opens with the famous Ride of the Valkyries, as the sisters gather on a mountaintop carrying fallen heroes. Wotan strips Brunnhilde of her divinity and puts her into a sleep on a rock, but at her plea surrounds her with a ring of fire that only a hero unafraid of his spear can cross. That farewell has been analysed as a loose version of a lyric form borrowed from conventional opera.
Wagner generally replaced arias and choruses with recurring leitmotifs, as set out in his 1851 essay Opera and Drama, though the Valkyries' ensemble singing bends the rule. King Ludwig II of Bavaria insisted on a standalone premiere in Munich on 26 June 1870; the work joined the full cycle at Bayreuth on 14 August 1876 and is still often staged on its own.
Source: Die Walküre
