Der Ring Des Nibelungen - Concept

Concept

In his earlier operas (up to and including Lohengrin) Wagner's style had been based, rather than on the Italian style of opera, on the German style as developed by Carl Maria von Weber, with elements of the grand opera style of Giacomo Meyerbeer. However he came to be dissatisfied with such a format as a means of artistic expression. He expressed this clearly in his essay 'A Communication to My Friends', (1851) in which he condemned the majority of modern artists, in painting and in music, as 'feminine the world of art close fenced from Life, in which Art plays with herself.' Where however the impressions of Life produce an overwhelming 'poetic force', we find the 'masculine, the generative path of Art'.

Wagner unfortunately found that his audiences were not willing to follow where he led them:

The public, by their enthusiastic reception of Rienzi and their cooler welcome of the Flying Dutchman, had plainly shown me what I must set before them if I sought to please. I completely undeceived their expectations; they left the theatre, after the first performance of Tannhäuser, in a confused and discontented mood. - The feeling of utter loneliness in which I now found myself, quite unmanned me. My Tannhäuser had appealed to a handful of intimate friends alone.

Finally Wagner announces:

I shall never write an Opera more. As I have no wish to invent an arbitrary title for my works, I will call them Dramas I propose to produce my myth in three complete dramas, preceded by a lengthy Prelude (Vorspiel). At a specially-appointed Festival, I propose, some future time, to produce those three Dramas with their Prelude, in the course of three days and a fore-evening. The object of this production I shall consider thoroughly attained, if I and my artistic comrades, the actual performers, shall within these four evenings succeed in artistically conveying my purpose to the true Emotional (not the Critical) Understanding of spectators who shall have gathered together expressly to learn it.

This is his first public announcement of the form of what would become the Ring cycle.

In accordance with the ideas expressed in his essays of the period 1849-1851 (including the 'Communication' but also 'Opera and Drama' and 'The Artwork of the Future'), the four parts of the 'Ring' were originally conceived by Wagner to be free of the traditional operatic concepts of aria and operatic chorus. The Wagner scholar Curt von Westernhagen identified three important problems discussed in 'Opera and Drama' which were particularly relevant to the Ring cycle: the problem of unifying verse stress with melody; the disjunctions caused by formal arias in dramatic structure, and the way in which opera music could be organised on a different basis of organic growth and modulation; and the function of musical motifs in linking elements of the plot whose connections might otherwise be inexplicit. This became known as the leitmotif technique, (see below), although Wagner himself did not use this word.

However, Wagner relaxed some aspects of his self-imposed restrictions somewhat as the work progressed. As George Bernard Shaw sardonically (and slightly unfairly) noted of the last opera Götterdämmerung

And now, O Nibelungen Spectator, pluck up; for all allegories come to an end somewhere The rest of what you are going to see is opera, and nothing but opera. Before many bars have been played, Siegfried and the wakened Brynhild, newly become tenor and soprano, will sing a concerted cadenza; plunge on from that to a magnificent love duetThe work which follows, entitled Night Falls On The Gods, is a thorough grand opera.