The Ring Cycle (1 gen 1848 anni – 1 gen 1876 anni)

Descrizione:

The mammoth project had modest beginnings. In the fall of 1848 Wagner drafter the "poem" for a new work to be called Siegfrieds Tod (The Death of Siegfried).

Wagner's aim in Siegfrieds Tod was to link the personal tragedy of the great German folk hero Siegfried, a traditional sort of operatic subject, with the Medieval Icelandic epics known as Eddas, the history of the gods. He hoped to elevated the drama to the level of a cosmogony, the story of the origins and destiny of the world; this would provide a suitably mythic subject for his socially transforming "Art Work of the Future." He started drafting the libretto for the opera but broke off... More to the artistic point, it struck him that the story started too late, that he had to provide a dramatic and musical background for Siegfried.

The first step was to depict Siegfried's coming of age as a hero, his killing the dragon, and his winning Brunnhilde. This as accomplished in another poem, called Der junge Siegfried. Next, to explain how the sleeping Brunnhilde had got where she was (on a rocky peak surrounded by fire) and to clarify Siegfried's qualifications for his heroic calling (being the incestuous--thus purebred--offspring of two Volsungs, Siegmund and Sieglinde), Wagner preceded Der junge Siegfried with another poem, Die Walkure (The Valkyrie, that is, Brunnhilde).

In the process of creating Die Walkure, Wagner reconfigured the drama of the Ring, centering it on Wotan, the chief of the Gods and Brunnhilde's father, rather than Siegfried. Wotan's original sin--of destroying the World Ash Tree by hacking his invincible spear from it--was the basis of the whole history of the Ring. While the original conclusion of Siegfrieds Tod ended with the redemption of the gods, it was now drastically revised with their violent destruction. It was renamed Gotterdammerung, or Twilight of the Gods. Finally, to introduce the beginning of this history--the theft of magic gold from the River Rhine and the forging of an all-empowering ring out of it by the dwarf Alberich, a Nibelung--Wagner wrote one last poem to serve as prologue, in the form of a single, mighty, two-hour-plus act: Das Rheingold. With the four poems finally ready, Wagner turned to writing the music, this time, proceeding in the chronological order of the narrative, as opposed to the backward order in which he had written the librettos.



Leitmotifs were created as means to unify four works heard over multiple nights, so that you could recognize some of the music

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