Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) is a cycle of four epic operas or 'music dramas' by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883). The operas are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied. The works are often referred to as "The Ring Cycle", "Wagner's Ring", or simply "The Ring".
Wagner wrote the libretto and music over the course of about twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874. The four operas that ...
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Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) is a cycle of four epic operas or 'music dramas' by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883). The operas are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied. The works are often referred to as "The Ring Cycle", "Wagner's Ring", or simply "The Ring".
Wagner wrote the libretto and music over the course of about twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874. The four operas that constitute the Ring cycle are, in the order of the imagined events they portray:
Although individual operas are performed as works in their own right, Wagner intended them to be a coherent whole, performed in a series.
History provides few examples of artistic purpose so consistently followed as that which produced Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. As early as the 1840s, Wagner began to search Teutonic and Norse mythology for material for his epic, and it was not until the end of 1874 that the last bar of Götterdämmerung ("The...
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