Das Rheingold (; The Rhinegold), WWV 86A, is the first of the four epic music dramas that constitute Richard Wagner's cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (English: The Ring of the Nibelung). It premiered as a single opera at the National Theatre of Munich on 22 September 1869, and received its first performance as part of the Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 13 August 1876.
Wagner wrote the Ring librettos in reverse order, so that Das Rheingold was the last of the texts to be written; it was, however, the first to be set to music. The score was completed in 1854, but Wagner was unwilling to sanction its performance until the whole cycle was complete; he worked intermittently on this music until 1874. The 1869 Munich premiere of Das Rheingold was staged, against Wagner's wishes, on the orders of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, his patron. Following its 1876 Bayreuth premiere, the Ring cycle was introduced into the worldwide repertory, with performances in all the main opera houses, in which it has remained a regular and popular fixture.
In his 1851 essay Opera and Drama, Wagner had set out new principles as to how music dramas should be constructed, under which the conventional forms of opera (arias, ensembles, choruses) were rejected. Rather than providing word-settings, the music would interpret the text emotionally, reflecting the feelings and moods behind the work, by using a system of recurring leitmotifs to represent people, ideas and situations. Das Rheingold was Wagner's first work that adopted these principles, and his most rigid adherence to them, despite a few deviations – the Rhinemaidens frequently sing in ensemble.
As the "preliminary evening" within the cycle, Das Rheingold gives the background to the events that drive the main dramas of the cycle. It recounts Alberich's theft of the Rhine gold after his renunciation of love; his fashioning of the all-powerful ring from the gold and his enslavement of the Nibelungs; Wotan's seizure of the gold and the ring, to pay his debt to the giants who have built his fortress Valhalla; Alberich's curse on the ring and its possessors; Erda's warning to Wotan to forsake the ring; the early manifestation of the curse's power after Wotan yields the ring to the giants; and the gods' uneasy entry into Valhalla, under the shadow of their impending doom.
Background and context
Having completed his opera Lohengrin in April 1848, Richard Wagner chose as his next subject Siegfried, the legendary hero of Germanic myth. In October of that year he prepared a prose outline for Siegfried's Death, which during the following months he developed into a full libretto. After his flight from Dresden and relocation in Switzerland, he continued to develop and expand his Siegfried project, having decided meantime that a single work would not suffice for his purposes; in his enlarged concept, Siegfried's Death would be the culmination of a series of musical dramas incorporating a network of myths from his sources and imagination, each telling a stage of the story. In 1851 he outlined his purpose in his essay "A Communication to My Friends": "I propose to produce my myth in three complete dramas, preceded by a lengthy prelude (Vorspiel)." Each of these dramas would, he said, constitute an independent whole, but would not be performed separately. "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.
In accordance with this scheme, Siegfried's Death, much revised from its original form, eventually became Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods). It was preceded by the story of Siegfried's youth, Young Siegfried, later renamed Siegfried, itself preceded by Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). Finally, to these three works Wagner added a prologue which he named Das Rheingold.
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!Munich premiere cast In April 1878 Das Rheingold was produced in Leipzig, as part of the first full Ring cycle to be staged outside Bayreuth. London followed suit in May 1882, when Rheingold began a cycle at Her Majesty's Theatre, Haymarket, under the baton of Anton Seidl. In the years following the London premiere, Ring cycles were staged in many European capitals. In Budapest on 26 January 1889, the first Hungarian performance of Das Rheingold, conducted by the young Gustav Mahler, was briefly interrupted when the prompt-box caught fire and a number of patrons fled the theatre.
The American premiere of Das Rheingold was given by the New York Metropolitan Opera in January 1889, as a single opera, with Seidl conducting. The production used Carl Emil Doepler's original Bayreuth costume designs, and scenery was imported from Germany. According to The New York Times, "[t]he scenery, costumes and effects were all designed and executed with great art and caused admirable results." Thereafter, Das Rheingold, either alone or as part of the Ring, became a regular feature of the international opera repertory, being seen in Saint Petersburg (1889), Paris (1901), Buenos Aires (1910), Melbourne (1913),, and Rio de Janeiro (1921), as well many other major venues.
After the 1896 revival, Das Rheingold was being performed regularly at the Bayreuth Festival, although not every year, within a variety of Ring productions. Until the Second World War, under the successive artistic control of Cosima (from 1896 to 1907), her son Siegfried (1908 to 1930) and Siegfried's widow Winifred (1931 to 1943), these productions did not deviate greatly from the stagings devised by Wagner for the 1876 premiere. With few exceptions, this generally conservative, even reverential approach – which extended to all Wagner's operas – tended to be mirrored in performances outside Bayreuth.
New Bayreuth and experimentation
The Bayreuth Festival, suspended after the Second World War, resumed in 1951 under Wieland Wagner, Siegfried's son, who introduced his first Ring cycle in the "New Bayreuth" style. This was the antithesis of all that had been seen at Bayreuth before, as scenery, costumes and traditional gestures were abandoned and replaced by a bare disc, with evocative lighting effects to signify changes of scene or mood. The stark New Bayreuth style dominated most Rheingold and Ring productions worldwide until the 1970s, when a reaction to its bleak austerity produced a number of fresh approaches. The Bayreuth centenary Ring production of 1976, directed by Patrice Chéreau provided a significant landmark in the history of Wagner stagings: "Chéreau's demythologization of the tetralogy entailed an anti-heroic view of the work ... his setting of the action in an industrialized society ... along with occasional 20th century costumes and props, suggested a continuity between Wagner's time and our own". Many of this production's features were highly controversial: the opening of Das Rheingold revealed a vast hydro-electric dam in which the gold is stored, guarded by the Rhinemaidens who were portrayed, in Spotts's words, as "three voluptuous tarts" – a depiction, he says, which "caused a shock from which no one quite recovered". According to The Observers critic, "I had not experienced in the theatre protest as furious as that which greeted Das Rheingold." Eventually this hostility was overcome; the final performance of this production, in 1980, was followed by an ovation that lasted ninety minutes.
Post-1980s
The iconoclastic centenary Ring was followed by numerous original interpretations, at Bayreuth and elsewhere, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The 1988 festival opened with Harry Kupfer's grim interpretation of Das Rheingold, in which Wotan and the other gods were represented as gangsters in mafioso sunglasses. This entire Ring, says Spotts, was "a parable of how the power-hungry cheat, lie, bully, terrorise and kill to get what they want". In August Everding's Chicago Reingold (which would become part of a full Ring cycle four years later), the Rhinemaidens were attached to elasticated ropes manipulated from the wings, which enabled them to cavort freely through the air, using lip sync to co-ordinate with off-stage singers. Edward Rothstein, writing in The New York Times, found the production "a puzzle ... cluttered with contraptions and conceits" which, he imagined, were visual motifs which would be clarified in later operas. Keith Warner, in his 2004 production for Covent Garden, portrayed, according to Barry Millington's analysis, "the shift from a deistic universe to one controlled by human beings". The dangers of subverted scientific progress were demonstrated in the third Rheingold scene, where Nibelheim was represented as a medical chamber of horrors, replete with vivisections and "unspeakable" genetic experiments.
From the late 1980s a backlash against the tendency towards ever more outlandish interpretations of the Ring cycle led to several new productions in the more traditional manner. Otto Schenk's staging of Das Rheingold, first seen at the New York Met in 1987 and forming the prelude to his full Ring cycle two years later, was described by The New York Times as "charmingly old fashioned", and as "a relief to many beleaguered Wagnerites".
Music
Das Rheingold was Wagner's first attempt to write dramatic music in accordance with the principles he had enunciated in Opera and Drama, hence the general absence in the score of conventional operatic "numbers" in the form of arias, ensembles and choruses. Rather than acting as the accompanist to the voices, the orchestra combines with them on equal terms to propel the drama forward. According to Barry Millington's analysis, Das Rheingold represents Wagner's purest application of the Opera and Drama principles, a rigorous stance that he would eventually modify. Even in Rheingold, as Jacobs indicates, Wagner was flexible when the dramatic occasion warranted it; thus, the Rhinemaidens sing in the disavowed ensembles, and there are several instances in which characters sing melodies that appear to be musically independent from the general flow. The music is continuous, with instrumental entr'actes linking the actions of the four discrete scenes.
Prelude
The prelude to Das Rheingold consists of an extended (136-bar) chord in E major, which begins almost inaudibly in the lowest register of eight double-basses. The note of B is added by the bassoons and the chord is further embellished as the horns enter with a rising arpeggio to announce the "Nature" motif, outlining the lower partials of an harmonic series with an E fundamental. This is further elaborated in the strings; the lower-register instruments sustain the E note throughout the prelude, while the chord is increasingly enhanced by the orchestra. The "Rhine" motif emerges, representing what Osborne describes as "the calm, majestic course of the river's character The composer Robert Erickson describes the prelude as drone music – "the only well-known drone piece in the concert repertory". Millington suggests that the protracted chord does not simply represent the depths of the Rhine, rather "the birth of the world, the act of creation itself".
First scene
When the prelude reaches its climax the curtain rises and the key shifts to A as Woglinde sings a "greeting to the waters". The first two and last two notes of this short, lilting passage form a falling musical step which, in different guises, will recur throughout the opera, signifying variously the Rhinemaidens' innocence, their joy in the gold and conversely, in the minor key, Alberich's woe at his rejection by the maidens, and his enslavement of the Nibelungs. The first appearance of the gold is signified by a muted horn call in the lower register, played under a shimmer of undulating strings, conveying, says Holman, "the shining, innocent beauty of the Rhinegold in its unfashioned state." The motif for the ring itself first appears in the woodwind, as Wellgunde reveals that a ring fashioned from the gold would confer on its owner the power to win the wealth of the world. This is followed by what is sometimes known as the "renunciation" motif, when Woglinde sings that to fashion such a ring, the owner must first renounce love. Confusion arises because this same motif is used later in the Ring cycle to represent affirmation rather than rejection of love; Roger Scruton suggests the motif would be more appropriately labelled "existential choice". Alberich duly curses love, seizes the gold and departs, to the sounds of the despairing shrieks of the Rhinemaidens.
Second scene
thumb|upright=0.8|The gods begin to lose their youth on Freia's departure
During the first entr'acte, the Ring motif is transformed into the multipart and oft-reiterated "Valhalla" music – four intertwined motifs which represent the majesty of the gods and the extent of Wotan's power. Scene two begins on the mountaintop, in sight of the newly completed castle, where Fricka and Wotan bicker over Wotan's contract with the giants. This duologue is characterised by Fricka's "Love's longing" motif, in which she sighs for a home that will satisfy Wotan and halt his infidelities. Freia's distressed entrance is illustrated by "Love", a fragment that will recur and develop as the Ring cycle unfolds. The Giants' entrance is signified by heavy, stamping music that reflects both their simple nature and their brute strength. The "Golden Apples" motif, of "remarkable beauty" according to Scruton, is sung by Fafner as a threatening reminder to the gods that the loss of Freia means the loss of their youth and vigour; it is later used by Loge to mock the gods for their weakness after Freia's departure with the giants. The "Spear" motif, a rapidly descending scale, represents the moral basis of Wotan's power and the sanctity of the treaties engraved on it. The phrase of five descending notes known as "Woman's Worth", first sung by Loge, is described by Holman as one of the most pervasive and appealing motifs in the entire Ring cycle – he lists 43 occurrences of the motif throughout the cycle. Many of the Rings characters – Wotan, Froh, Alberich, Fasolt and Erda in Das Rheingold – either sing this phrase or are orchestrally referenced by it.
Third scene
The descent of Wotan and Loge into Nibelheim is represented musically in the second entr'acte, which begins with the "renunciation" and "spear" motifs but is quickly overwhelmed with the insistent, rhythmic 9/8 beat of the Nibelung motif in B, briefly foreshadowed in Loge's scene 2 soliloquy. In the climax to the entr'acte this rhythm is hammered out on eighteen anvils. This motif is thereafter used, not just to represent the Nibelungs but also their enslavement in a state of relentless misery. During the scene's opening interaction between Alberich and Mime, the soft, mysterious "Tarnhelm" motif is heard on muted horns; this is later combined with the "serpent" motif as, at Loge's behest, Alberich uses the Tarnhelm to transform himself into a giant snake. The transition back to the mountaintop, following Alberich's entrapment, references a number of motifs, among them Alberich's woe, the ring, renunciation and the Nibelungs' enslavement.
Fourth scene
After Wotan seizes the ring from the captive Alberich, the dwarf's agonised, self-pitying monologue ("Am I now free?") ends with his declamation of the "Curse" motif – "one of the most sinister musical ideas ever to have entered the operatic repertoire", according to Scruton's analysis: "It rises through a half-diminished chord, and then falls through an octave to settle on a murky C major triad, with clarinets in their lowest register over a timpani pedal in F sharp". This motif will recur throughout the cycle; it will be heard later in this scene, when Fafner clubs Fasolt to death over possession of the ring. Tranquil, ascending harmonies introduce the reconvention of the gods and giants. The subsequent dispute over Wotan's reluctance to part with the ring ends with Erda's appearance; her motif is a minor-key variation of the "Nature" motif from the prelude. After her warning she departs to the sounds of the "Downfall" motif, an inversion of Erda's entry that resembles "Woman's Worth". The scene ends with a rapid succession of motifs: "Donner's Call", a horn fanfare by which he summons the thunderstorm; Froh's "Rainbow Bridge" which provides a path for the gods into Valhalla; the "Sword" motif, a C major arpeggio that will become highly significant in later Ring operas, and the haunting "Rhinemaidens' Lament", developed from the falling step which earlier signified the maidens' joy in the gold. Scruton writes of this lament: "And yet, ever sounding in the depths, is the lament of the Rhine-daughters, singing of a natural order that preceded the conscious will that has usurped it. This lament sounds in the unconsciousness of us all, as we pursue our paths to personality, sovereignty and freedom...". These are the last voices that are heard in the opera, "piercing our hearts with sudden longing, melting our bones with nostalgic desire", before the gods, "marching in empty triumph to their doom", enter Valhalla to a thunderous orchestral conclusion, made up from several motifs including "Valhalla", "Rainbow Bridge" and the "Sword".
Orchestral forces
Das Rheingold is scored for the following instrumental forces:
- Woodwind: Piccolo; 3 flutes; 3 oboes; cor anglais; 3 clarinets; bass clarinet; 3 bassoons
- Brass: 8 horns (5-8 doubling Wagner Tubas in Bb and F); 3 trumpets; bass trumpet; 2 tenor trombones; bass trombone; contrabass trombone (doubling bass trombone); contrabass tuba
- Percussion: 2 sets of timpani; cymbals; triangle; tam-tam
- Strings: 16 first violins; 16 second violins; 12 violas; 12 cellos; 8 double basses; 6 harps (plus a seventh off-stage)
- Off-stage: 18 anvils of varying sizes (tuned to 3 octaves of F); hammer; thunder machine
Critical assessment
Although it is sometimes performed independently, Das Rheingold is not generally considered outside the structure of the Ring cycle. However, as Millington points out, it is a substantial work in its own right, and has several characteristics not shared by the other works in the tetralogy. It is comparatively short, with continuous music; no interludes or breaks. The action moves forward relatively swiftly, unencumbered, as Arnold Whittall observes, by the "retarding explanations" – pauses in the action to clarify the context of what is going on – that permeate the later, much longer works. Its lack of the conventional operatic devices (arias, choruses, ensembles) further enable the story to progress briskly.
Since it was written as a prelude to the main events, Das Rheingold is in itself inconclusive, leaving numerous loose ends to be picked up later; its function, as Jacobs says, is "to expound, not to draw conclusions". The fact that most of its characters display decidedly human emotions makes it seem, according to a recent writer, "much more a present-day drama than a remote fable". Nevertheless, Philip Kennicott, writing in The Washington Post describes it as "the hardest of the four installments to love, with its family squabbles, extensive exposition, and the odd, hybrid world Wagner creates, not always comfortably balanced between the mythic and the recognizably human." Certain presumptions are challenged or overturned; John Louis Gaetani, in a 2006 essay, notes that, in Loge's view, the gods are far more culpable than the Nibelungs, and that Wotan, for all his prestige as the ruler of the gods, "does much more evil than Alberich ever dreams of".
Recording
Live performances of Das Rheingold from Bayreuth and elsewhere were recorded from 1937 onwards, but were not issued for many years. The first studio recording, and the first to be issued commercially, was Georg Solti's 1958 Decca version, part of his complete Ring cycle, 1958–1966, which marked the beginning of a new era in recorded opera. Since then Das Rheingold has been recorded, as part of the cycle, on many occasions, with regular new issues.
Notes and references
Notes
Citations
Sources
- (First published 1935, revised 1965, 1974 and 1980)
External links
- Richard Wagner – Das Rheingold, gallery of historic postcards with motifs from Richard Wagner's operas
- Vocal score of Das Rheingold
- Complete libretto of the opera, in German
- Complete libretto of The Ring Cycle in English and German
- Das Rheingold on DVD
- L'Or du Rhin, 1880 piano–vocal score, French by Victor Wilder, via Internet Archive
- The story of the Rhinegold (Der Ring des Nibelungen) told for young people, Anna Alice Chapin, (1897), New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, pubdate 1900