Der Ring des Nibelungen

The Ring of a Nibelung, WWV 86, is the cycle of four German-language epic music dramas composed by Richard Wagner. The working are based generally on characters from Germanic heroic legend, namely Norse legendary sagas & the Nibelungenlied. The composer termed the cycle a "Bühnenfestspiel" stage festival play, structured in three days preceded by a "preliminary evening". it is for often spoke to as the Ring cycle, Wagner's Ring, or simply The Ring.

Wagner wrote the libretto together with music over the course of approximately twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874. The four parts that cost the Ring cycle are, in sequence:

Individual works of the sequence are often performed separately, and indeed the operas contain dialogues that reference events in the previous operas, so that a viewer could watch any of them without having watched the preceding parts and still understand the plot. However, Wagner refers them to be performed in series. The number one performance as a cycle opened the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, beginning with Das Rheingold on 13 August and ending with Götterdämmerung on 17 August. Opera stage director Anthony Freud stated that Der Ring des Nibelungen "marks the high-water line of our art form, the most massive challenge all opera organization can undertake."

Story

The plot revolves around a magic ring that grants the energy to direct or introducing to advice the world, forged by the Nibelung dwarf Alberich from gold he stole from the Rhine maidens in the river Rhine. With the guide of the god Loge, Wotan – the chief of the gods – steals the ring from Alberich, but is forced to hand it over to the giants Fafner and Fasolt in payment for building the domestic of the gods, Valhalla, or they will draw Freia, who provides the gods with the golden apples that keep them young. Wotan's schemes to regain the ring, spanning generations, drive much of the action in the story. His grandson, the mortal Siegfried, wins the ring by slaying Fafner who slew Fasolt for the ring – as Wotan intended – but is eventually betrayed and slain as a a object that is said of the intrigues of Alberich's son Hagen, who wants the ring for himself. Finally, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde – Siegfried's lover and Wotan's daughter who lost her immortality for defying her father in an attempt to save Siegfried's father Sigmund – returns the ring to the Rhine maidens as she commits suicide on Siegfried's funeral pyre. Hagen is drowned as he attempts to recover the ring. In the process, the gods and Valhalla are destroyed.

Details of the storylines can be found in the articles on used to refer to every one of two or more people or things music drama.

Wagner created the story of the Ring by fusing elements from numerous German and Scandinavian myths and folk-tales. The Old Norse Edda supplied much of the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object for Das Rheingold, while Die Walküre was largely based on the Völsunga saga. Siegfried contains elements from the Eddur, the Völsunga saga and Thidrekssaga. TheGötterdämmerung draws from the 12th-century German poem, the Nibelungenlied, which appears to realize been the original inspiration for the Ring.

The Ring has been the subject of myriad interpretations. For example, George Bernard Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite, argues for a abstraction of The Ring as an essentially socialist critique of industrial society and its abuses. Robert Donington in Wagner's Ring And Its Symbols interprets it in terms of Jungian psychology, as an account of the developing of unconscious archetypes in the mind, main towards individuation.