WAGNER AND THE CREATION OF THE RING

Engaging with the Ring cycle in all its rich, contradictory, and exhilarating glory.

Early on, conductor Downes writes, “If The Ring is a great nineteenth-century story, then so too is the story of how [Richard] Wagner brought it into being.” He begins in 1846 in Dresden with 32-year-old Royal Kapellmeister Wagner dealing with financial and political issues that impede his desire to create a fine orchestra and theater. He has composed excellent operas, but he’s obsessed with one “on the grandest possible scale.” Downes discusses how Wagner was inspired by Nordic sources, including Nibelungenlied, before touching on his antisemitism. In 1853 Wagner gives a private reading of his latest poems, with their extravagant alliteration, which contained the basis of a musical form “unlike,” Downes writes, “any opera libretto that had ever previously existed,” to a large audience, including his friend, Franz Liszt. The drama focuses on the gods and the necessity of their destruction, crafted while he faces financial woes and poor health. Next up is the music, beginning with Das Rheingold, which opens with “136 bars based on a single chord.” Downes is meticulous and insightful in examining how Wagner creates this music with his “sonic imagination,” even creating new instruments with which to play it, including anvils. Wagner is determined to make sounds never heard before. Die Walküre is completed in 1856, some five years after he first imagined it. Siegfried, a lighthearted intermezzo, separates the great tragedies of Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung. When Das Rheingold was performed in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1876, Edvard Grieg, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky were in the audience. Downes includes a handy chronology and helpful synopses of the four operas.

A concise, insightful, and enthusiastic foray into Wagner’s magnum opus.