Music:
Member Since: 3/18/2007
Band Members:
Positively NO Nazis on my pages.
And I won't even say "sorry".
The Operas:
Der Ring des Nibelungen
(The Ring of the Nibelung)
consisting of
(1854) Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold)
Opera Page
(1856) Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) Opera Page
(1871) Siegfried Opera Page
(1874) Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) Opera Page
For a detailed plot synopsis and lists of characters, see the pages for the individual operas.
Influences:
The Solti Ring
From a 1965 BBC documentary on the first complete recording
Fascinating insights into the work of a legendary conductor. Solti's seminal 1965 recording remains the benchmark to this day.Sir Georg Solti talks about his work on the "Ring".Solti Interview on recording the Ring
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The use of specifically Wagnerian instruments in "Götterdämmerung"The "Stierhorn" in Götterdämmerung
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The "Centennial" Ring and before
From a 1987 documentary
The celebrated 1976 Bayreuth "Ring" production by Pierre Boulez, Patrice Chereau and Richard Peduzzi in historical perspective.
The Centennial Ring
Music:
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Music of the "Ring"
In his previous operas, Wagner had tried to disguise the song breaks as part of the music. For the Ring he decided to adopt a through-composed style, where each act of each opera would be a complete song with no breaks whatsoever. In the essay Opera and Drama (1852) Wagner describes the way in which poetry, music and the visual arts should combine to form what he called The Artwork of the Future. He called these artworks "music-dramas", and thereafter very rarely referred to his works as operas.
As a new foundation for his music-dramas, Wagner adopted the use of what he called Grundthemen, or "base themes", although they are usually referred to elsewhere as leitmotifs. These are recurring melodies and/or harmonic progressions, sometimes tied to a particular key and often to a particular orchestration. They musically denote an action, object, emotion, character or other subject mentioned in the text and/or presented onstage. Wagner referred to them in Opera and Drama as "guides-to-feeling", and described how they could be used to inform the listener of a musical or dramatic subtext to the action onstage in the same way as a Greek Chorus did for Attic Drama. While other composers before Wagner had already used leitmotifs, the Ring was unique in the extent to which they were employed, and in the ingeniousness of their combination and development.
Any important subject in The Ring is usually accompanied by a leitmotif; indeed, there are long stretches of music which are constructed exclusively from them. One such example occurs in Götterdämmerung: Siegfried's journey down the river Rhine is described first through a rhapsody on the Siegfried theme which then merges into the Rhine theme and finally into the motifs denoting the Gibichung Hall.
("Morgendämmerung und Rheinfahrt" featured on this page.)There are hundreds of individual motifs scattered throughout the Ring. They often occur as a musical reference to a presentation of their subject onstage, or to a direct reference in the text, or more subtly implied by the text. Many of them appear in several operas, and some even in all four. Sometimes, as in the character of the Woodbird, a cluster of motives is associated with a single character. As the cycle progresses, and especially from the third act of Siegfried on, these motives are presented in increasingly sophisticated combinations.
The advances in orchestration and tonality Wagner made in this work are of seminal importance in the history of Western music. He wrote for a very large orchestra, with a palette of seventeen different instrumental families used singly or in a myriad of combinations to express the great range of emotion and events of the drama.
This work, together with Tristan und Isolde, is frequently cited as a milestone on the way to Arnold Schoenberg's revolutionary break with the traditional concept of key and his rejection of consonance as the basis of an organising principle in music.
About these pages:
Visual Concept
(A.S.-L.)
The background image for the „Ring“ main page is an illustration of Germanic cosmology – Yggdrasil, the World Ash Tree (out of which Wotan’s spear is forged) – against the backdrop of a distant galactic nebula potographed by the „Hubble“ space telescope. This is meant to underscore that the „Ring“ is a
Cosmic Drama.
The Table backgrounds for the four „Ring“ Operas – all stacked together here in the „About“ section and connected by the ring - refer to the four Aristotelian elements. The Element images have been assigned to the respective Opera pages.
Why? Alan David Aberbach (see blog, recommended reading) notes:
Designed to show the creation of the world order that is to be portrayed, he [Wagner] assumes for himself "the agonizingly difficult task of forming a nonexistent world." Emerging slowly out of a void, his model eventually embraces the four cosmic elements: water (Rhinegold), air (Valkyrie), earth (Siegfried), and fire (Twilight of the Gods): "Mark my new poem well - it holds the world's beginning, and its destruction!"
In this context, the Ring may allude to Alchemy’s â€Opus Magnumâ€, the Philosopher’s Stone, also known as the Fifth Element. The magical (!) process of procuring the Stone - which supposedly is capable of converting non-precious metals into gold - has been allegorically labled as the
Squaring Of The Circle (a mathematical impossibility due to the fact that
Pi is an irrational number). Hence the
Ring of Power.
Type of Label: Major
