Wagner and the Creation of the Ring

The life of German composer Richard Wagner (1813–83) reads like a soap opera. After they married in 1836, his wife Minna left him the following year, then reconciled for a tempestuous marriage a year later. They fled Riga in 1839 because of debt and left Saxony in 1849 because Wagner supported the Revolution of 1848. His long-term affair with Cosima, the wife of his conductor Hans von Bülow, ended with him marrying her after she’d borne him three children and Minna had died. He began work on the five-opera Ring Cycle (Siegfried to Götterdämmerung) in 1848, not finishing it until 1874. The last piece, Götterdämmerung, premiered in Bayreuth in 1876. Only someone as steeped in Wagner’s music as Downes (The Wagners) could have produced this book. He appreciates Wagner’s innovations: using musical leitmotifs to tie together complex stories, experimenting with tonality, subordinating music to story and words, and even redesigning orchestra and theater for dramatic effect. Downes categorizes Wagner as a storyteller alongside Dickens, Hugo, and Tolstoy but also decries his virulent antisemitic tirades.