Unveiling Wagner: The Ring Cycle, His Terminology, and the Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Hi everybody. History of opera is full of interesting events and intriguing characters. One of these characters is the German opera composer Reinhard Wagner. When we talk about Wagner, we always think about Bayreuth, where he built his dream opera house in the 1870s. Today I'm going to tell you about Wagner and his famous The Ring Cycle briefly while we're visiting German opera composer and theorist Reinhard Wagner was one of the most influential figures of the 19th century and is certainly one of the most important composers of all time. His stage works and music had a revolutionary influence on the course of western music, sometimes by extension of his discoveries or a reaction against them. Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813 and was baptized at the Thomaskirche, the church of Saint Thomas, where less than a hundred years before Johann Sebastian Bach was the Kapellmeister. Even though he attended schools due to his rebellious character, he mostly taught himself by studying the scores of early masters. Due to his adventurous character and also political views, he had to live in exile sometimes. He was also infamous with his affairs, particularly with married women. This is also another reason that he had to live in exile. His affair with another married woman, no other than the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt's illegitimate daughter Kozima Liszt, who was 24 years his junior, turned out to be his last and big one. Reinhard and Kozima had already three children while she was still married to a champion of Wagner's works, the conductor Hans von Bülow. Kozima outlived Reinhard by nearly half a century, dying in 1930. Starting with his opera Tannhäuser, composed in 1845, all his future works were based on Germanic legends. His name is now associated with several terms like unendliche Melodie, Gesamtkunstwerk and Leitmotiv. In his revolutionary type of musical stage work, the music was continuous, with no pause throughout a single act, where the orchestra became the sole expressor of the characters, emotions and actions. This was a major change from the earlier operas where there were numbers of choirs, recitative and aria pairs, therefore the unending melody. He used leitmotifs in German, literally leading motifs, musical calling cards if you like, small musical ideas or motifs identified with characters, ideas or even things in the drama. He called his operas Gesamtkunstwerk, that means a total work of art, because he believed that opera was not only music and singing and acting, but also included stage design, sculpture, painting, literature, poetry and even architecture. Wagner's most famous work is the Ring Cycle, the Ring of the Nibelung or Der Ring des Nibelungen in German. Wagner's Ring Cycle is made up of four epic music dramas, namely Das Rheingold, the Rheingold, Die Walküre, The Valkyries, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, The Twilight of the Gods, composed between 1848 and 1876. These works last approximately 16 hours. It's typically given in four consecutive nights or four different evenings. The plot revolves around the magic ring that grants the power to rule the world, forged by the Nibelung dwarf Alberich from gold he stole from the Rhine maidens in the River Rhine. Ring a bell? Yes, there is a great resemblance to the story of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. However, let me remind you that Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was published in the 1950s, whereas Wagner was working on his Ring Cycle already a hundred years earlier in the 1840s. It seems Wagner always wanted to have his own opera house where he could have his own works performed and this became more apparent after he had troubles with the opera houses in Munich and Dresden in the 1860s. It was suggested to him that he could use the Margraveau Opera House, which was built in the 1740s for the Margrave Frederick of Brandenburg and Bayreuth and his wife Wilhelmine. Wilhelmine, the sister of the Prussian King Frederick the Great, was also an avid music lover and also a composer herself. She worked at this opera house as a composer, as an actor and even stage director. The Margraveau Opera House in Bayreuth was left in mint condition after her death in 1758. However, because both the stage and the orchestra pit were too small for Wagner's large-scale works, this was not an option for Wagner. By this time, Wagner orchestra could require up to 125 musicians and the idea to build an opera house was thus born. Wagner liked Bayreuth, a small city in northern Bavaria. Plans were taken from an unbuilt opera house in Munich and the construction began here in 1872. Even though there was a major financial support from the Bavarian King Ludwig II, Wagner still had to raise considerable amount of money himself. Among the contributors to the opera house here was the Turkish Sultan Abdulaziz. Abdulaziz heard about this project when he was visiting Nuremberg in 1872 and bought three seats for 300 talers each. Unfortunately, he was never able to see a performance here as he was deposed of and possibly murdered in May 1876, only months before the inauguration at Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Bayreuther Festspielhaus, the Bayreuth Festival Theater, has various innovations. The horseshoe shape of the traditional opera houses is abandoned here. Instead, the seats are arranged in a single steeply shaped wedge, a plan that contemporary movie theorists use. This style of seating provides every seat an equal and uninterrupted view of the stage. There are boxes, but only along the back wall and the whole seats 1,925 people. Another feature of the Festspielhaus is a double proscenium, which gives the audience the illusion that the stage is further away than it actually is. But one of the most important features of the Festspielhaus, which was one of the biggest timber structures ever erected, is the orchestra pit. The pit at the Festspielhaus is recessed under the stage and covered by a hood. Therefore, it is completely hidden from the audience. Wagner thought that the orchestra, being completely invisible to the audience, would help the audience to concentrate on the drama on the stage. The large pit is also designed stepwise, so that the loudest instruments could be seated at the bottom of the pit, whereas other instruments, smaller instruments, are seated further up. This seating helps the balance between the singers and the very large orchestra that Wagner composed for. In this case, the singers can much more easily project over the large orchestra. Also, because of the hood above the pit, the sound of the orchestra is reflected first toward the stage, then it's mixed with the singers on the stage, and then pushed back out onto the audience, creating a much better balance and blend between the singers and the orchestra. The orchestra is also seated in an unusual way. For instance, the first and second violins are reversed, and that's because the orchestra in this way is actually facing not the audience, but the stage. This is an unusually large pit, but still, because there's a large orchestra, it's really crowded in there, and during the summer months when the festival takes place, and because there's no air conditioning or heating in this building, the temperatures in the orchestra pit can reach into the 30s, that is, upper 90s in Fahrenheit. Because of that, the performers, since they are not visible by the audience, are advised to dress lightly, informally, and comfortably, because there's less than one square meter per performer in this pit. The Festspielhaus was built only for Wagner's stage works, and most particularly the Ring Cycle. When entering the auditorium, audiences are met with a dimmed hall, where no sounds interrupt the performances, because there's no heating and there's no air conditioning in this building. When the first notes of the Plut to the Rheingold are heard, it is said that one cannot determine exactly where the sound is coming from, due to the hall's acoustical character, and the adventure of 16 hours long legend begins. The opening of the Festspielhaus was planned for the summer of 1873. However, due to the financial difficulties, the inauguration could only take place in the summer of 1876. First performances of the Ring Cycle were given here between August 13th and 17th 1876, and the festival could be repeated for a second time only six years later in 1882. We will continue to Wagner's story, his last opera Parsifal, and his death in Venice in the following year, in 1883, in another video. I suggest you can start listening to Wagner's music by listening to the highlights and also the preludes for his music dramas, if this is all very new for you. In this video, we have been hearing sections from the Ride of the Valkyries, from his opera The Valkyrie, and also the prelude to Das Rheingold. In this prelude, Wagner depicts the Rhine river from its beginnings in the Alps mountains, and what is really striking is that the whole prelude, about four minutes of music, is simply based on a single E-flat major chord. After all, whether it's a little spring or a large river, the material is just water. 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