Der Ring des Nibelungen

Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), WWV 86, is a set of four epic music dramas in German by Richard Wagner. The stories draw loosely on figures from Germanic heroic legend, including Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied. Wagner called the cycle a "Bühnenfestspiel" (stage festival play), arranged as three main days with a Vorabend ("preliminary evening") beforehand. It is commonly known as the Ring cycle, Wagner's Ring, or simply The Ring.

Wagner wrote both the words and the music over roughly twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874. The four parts of the Ring cycle, in order, are: Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). These individual works are often performed alone, and they include dialogue that refers to events in earlier parts, so a viewer can understand the plot of any single opera without having seen the others. Still, Wagner meant them to be performed as a whole. The first complete cycle opened the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, starting with Das Rheingold on 13 August and ending with Götterdämmerung on 17 August. Opera stage director Anthony Freud has said that Der Ring des Nibelungen "marks the high-water mark of our art form, the most massive challenge any opera company can undertake."

The title translates most directly as The Ring of the Nibelung. The Nibelung in the title is the dwarf Alberich, and the ring is the one he makes from the Rhinegold. So the title means "Alberich's Ring."

The cycle is enormous in scale. A full performance takes place over four nights at the opera, with a total playing time of about 15 hours, depending on the conductor's speed. The first and shortest work, Das Rheingold, has no intermission and is one continuous piece, typically lasting around two and a half hours. The final and longest, Götterdämmerung, can take up to five hours, not counting intermissions. The cycle is modeled on ancient Greek dramas, which were presented as three tragedies and one satyr play. The Ring proper begins with Die Walküre and ends with Götterdämmerung, with Rheingold as a prelude. Wagner called Das Rheingold a Vorabend, or "Preliminary Evening," and subtitled Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung as First Day, Second Day, and Third Day of the main trilogy.

The story is epic in scope. It follows the struggles of gods, heroes, and various mythical creatures over the magic ring that gives its owner power over the whole world. The drama and intrigue span three generations of main characters, leading to a final cataclysm at the end of Götterdämmerung. The music is thick and richly textured, becoming more complex as the cycle goes on. Wagner wrote for a huge orchestra, with an especially large brass section that includes instruments like the Wagner tuba, bass trumpet, and contrabass trombone. He uses a chorus only briefly, in acts 2 and 3 of Götterdämmerung, and then mostly men with just a few women. He eventually had a special theatre built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, to perform this work. The theatre has a stage that blends the large orchestra with the singers' voices, letting them sing at a natural volume so they do not have to strain during the long performances.

The plot centers on a magic ring that gives the power to rule the world. It is forged by the Nibelung dwarf Alberich from gold he steals from the Rhine maidens in the river Rhine. With help from the god Loge, Wotan—the chief of the gods—steals the ring from Alberich, but is forced to give it to the giants Fafner and Fasolt as payment for building the gods' home, Valhalla; otherwise they will take Freia, who provides the gods with golden apples that keep them young. Wotan's schemes to get the ring back, spanning generations, drive much of the action. His grandson, the mortal Siegfried, wins the ring by killing Fafner (who had killed Fasolt for the ring)—as Wotan intended—but is eventually betrayed and killed because of the plots of Alberich's son Hagen, who wants the ring for himself. Finally, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde—Siegfried's lover and Wotan's daughter, who lost her immortality for defying her father to try to save Siegfried's father Siegmund—gives the ring back to the Rhine maidens as she kills herself on Siegfried's funeral pyre. Hagen is drowned by the Rhine maidens as he tries to recover the ring. In the process, the gods and Valhalla are destroyed by fire.

Wagner developed the story by combining elements from many Germanic and Scandinavian myths and folk tales. The Old Norse Edda texts provided much material for Das Rheingold, while Die Walküre is largely based on the Völsunga saga. Siegfried includes elements from the Eddur, the Völsunga saga, and Thidrekssaga. The final Götterdämmerung draws from the 12th-century German poem the Nibelungenlied, which seems to have been the original inspiration for the Ring.

The Ring has been interpreted in many ways. For instance, George Bernard Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), argues for a view of the Ring as an essentially socialist critique of industrial society and its abuses. Robert Donington, in Wagner's Ring and Its Symbols (1963), interprets it in terms of Jungian psychology, as an account of the development of unconscious archetypes in the mind, leading toward individuation.