THE ESSENCE OF THE RING

BY BART DE VRIES

Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cycle of four operas by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) that consists of approximately 16 hours of music drama – too long to perform in a single concert. This month’s concert features Act III of Siegfried, the third opera.

Other than for its musical qualities, Act III is often seen as the turning point of the cycle.

Siegfried’s Act III consists of three scenes, all introduced by an orchestral prelude, in which most of the musical material is presented. In the first scene, the storyline evolves around how Wotan voluntarily gives up his powers and proclaims Siegfried and Brünnhilde to be his heirs. The second scene relates how Siegfried breaks Wotan’s spear (the symbol of his power and musically represented by a downward scale). In the final scene, the fearless Siegfried navigates through the ring of fire, within which Brünnhilde was put to sleep by Wotan for helping the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried’s parents. Siegfried awakes her with a kiss, and they fall in love. (Brünnhilde is a daughter of Wotan and Erda, the goddess of the earth. The twins Siegmund und Sieglinde were conceived by Wotan as well.)

The creation process of Wagner’s Ring was long. Wagner started working on the Ring in 1848, when he envisioned a heroic opera named Siegfried’s Death . He first worked on the libretto (something composers at the time usually didn’t do themselves), most of which was written in Zürich, where he lived in exile since 1849. He soon realized the story needed a prologue, The Young Siegfried . When the need for even more context arose, he added Das Rheingold (the so­called Vorabend or preliminary evening) and Die Walküre (First day) to form a cycle of four operas. In the process, The Young Siegfried became simply Siegfried (Second day), while Siegfried’s Death became Götterdämmerung (Third day). Based on its genesis, we could say that the Siegfried saga is the seed from which the cycle emerged.

Some scholars perceive Siegfried’s Act III as the dramatic pinnacle of the cycle. First of all, the drama evolves around the three most important characters of the entire Ring: Wotan, Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Secondly, Wagner describes the opening of Act III as “Wotan’s last ride, …[a] descent to the underworld”. The end of Valhalla is foreshadowed, but Wotan accepts it out of love for his grandson Siegfried, who, through his fearlessness, was able to retrieve the ring forged from the stolen Rhinegold. Finally, her love for Siegfried allows Brünnhilde to reject the world of the gods and therefore her own divine powers. Instead, she and Siegfried sing how their love transcends the glory of the gods, and even death, on which Götterdämmerung elaborates. Not that the rest of the cycle is without dramatic climaxes, but the ones in Siegfried seem the most crucial and cathartic in the entire sequence of events from the theft of the Rhinegold to the Hall of the Gods going up in flames. Wagner had taken a 12­year break from his composition work for the Ring after he had finished Siegfried’s Act II. When he restarted his work in 1869, his style had evolved and had become more symphonic. Instead of using recitatives, the music continues to flow. Wagner wrote: “Music transfigures everything, it never permits the hideousness of the bare word, however terrible the subject”, making Act III also musically a perfect part to perform on its own.