Richard Wagner’s four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen” (“The Ring of Nibelungen”) is an undisputed masterpiece of classical music. Since its premiere in 1876, “The Ring,” as it is collectively known, has become a cultural touchstone and has captivated global audiences.
Still, Wagner (1813–1883) and his music have faced a public-relations challenge. Biographers have assailed Wagner’s lack of moral character, and “The Ring” became associated with Nazi rallies in Germany.
While not ignoring the controversies, Michael Downes, a conductor and the director of music at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, focuses on the composition of the four operas. In “Wagner and the Creation of The Ring,” he writes, “Whether by supervising the invention of new instruments or by combining familiar instruments in new ways, Wagner determines to make every moment of his new drama sound like nothing that has ever been heard before.”
Why We Wrote This
An artistic achievement can sometimes be overshadowed by the views or actions of its creator. Conductor Michael Downes takes readers inside the creative process of Richard Wagner’s four-opera epic, “The Ring of Nibelungen.” While not ignoring debates past and present, the author finds much to appreciate in the music itself.
Downes’ grand story is about how, over nearly three decades, Wagner envisioned, wrote, composed, and created an all-encompassing artistic experience. He put himself in charge of everything from writing the libretti (published as poems before he imagined the music) to the casting, directing, and staging. He recruited sponsors to fund the building of the festival theater in Bayreuth, Germany, where “The Ring” was first presented. Downes observes that “these events required not just musicianship but also impressive organisational, political, diplomatic, literary and rhetorical skills.”
Though the supreme synopses of “The Ring” belong to the pen of playwright George Bernard Shaw (in “The Perfect Wagnerite”), Downes is an efficient summarizer of the complicated plots. He also recounts, in the spirit of an opera buffa, the composer’s own tangled love life. After extramarital affairs and the death of his wife, Minna, he took up with a daughter of Franz Liszt, Cosima, who was married to Hans von Bülow, a conductor who helped Wagner’s early career. After Cosima’s divorce, she and Wagner married in 1870.
Downes points out the composer’s problematic behaviors, such as lying to benefactors and creditors, holding “often repellent political views,” and writing antisemitic diatribes that trade in offensive Jewish stereotypes.
Against the backdrop of mid-19th-century upheavals in Europe, Wagner was an enthusiastic revolutionary and applauded violence to achieve political ends. After he participated in an uprising, there were even calls for his arrest. Yet in his ambition to have his operas staged, he suppressed or disowned his political ideals and made bargains with royal and governmental financiers.
After the premiere of “The Ring,” although it had been critically admired and its performances fully attended, Wagner, characteristically in debt, did not have enough money to stage it again for several years. By that time, he had lost something of his confidence in it. Downes reminds us that “Within a few years ‘The Ring’ will sell out theatres across Europe – and that within a few more, half of the world’s writers, artists and musicians will come under its spell.” It seems no composer has more influenced Hollywood music than Wagner. We have all heard his work (or derivations of it) in the sweeping, lush orchestrations in cinematic romances, adventures, and war stories.
After Wagner’s death, his heirs carried on the legacy of “The Ring,” most infamously in the 1930s when Wagner’s son’s wife and grandson cozied up to Adolf Hitler, who promoted the music as Nazi theme songs. “The prominent support given to the [Bayreuth] festival before and during the war by the Nazi Party and by Hitler himself has caused immense, perhaps irrevocable damage to its reputation – and by extension to that of Wagner’s work,” Downes writes.
As an acknowledged admirer of Wagner’s accomplishments, Downes begins and ends the book by recounting his own experiences of attending performances of “The Ring” before, during, and after the pandemic years: “I now navigate my way through the experience with a better sense of the cycle’s peculiar geography, of where the hidden peaks as well as the obvious ones lie; I notice more and more links between themes each time I attend a performance, so that by the end of ‘Gotterdammerung’ [‘The Twilight of the Gods,’ the last of the four operas] almost everything seems connected to everything else, which is probably the effect Wagner intends.”
Every vast artistic work has its own story, because each one demands or commands so much of its creator’s life.
