Wagner and the Creation of the Ring by Michael Downes
The small Bavarian town of Bayreuth had never seen anything like it. For three weeks in August 1876, its broad streets, noble houses, and fountained squares were filled with people not only from across Germany but also from France, Britain, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia, and the Americas. “In the flat next to me there lives a composer of operas, across the corridor a famous singer, below me a celebrated music director and above me a well-known critic,” wrote Edvard Grieg, moonlighting as a journalist. “Sitting here I can hear all around me Wagnerian themes being hummed, sung, yodeled and shouted up from the garden. Going to the window I can see Valkyries, Rhinemaidens, giants and dwarfs, gods and mortals, all disporting themselves under the shade of the trees.”
The occasion for this great influx of opera aficionados and mythological characters into Upper Franconia was, of course, the first complete performance of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. As another composer, Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, informed the readers of the Russian Register: “This colossal work by the most renowned of all living composers is—irrespective of the success which falls to its lot this summer—without any doubt an exceptionally remarkable phenomenon, which in some way is bound to leave behind a blazing trail in history.”
