When Wagner premiered his complete 4-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen between August 13 through 17, 1876, it was a daring and ambitious project. Spanning four operas, more than 15 hours of music, and the culmination of a quarter-century of work, Wagner set out to create something unlike audiences had experienced before.
Of course, when you attempt something entirely new on the scale of The Ring, perfection is unlikely. Alongside its musical innovations and profound philosophical questions are stories of exhaustion, technical mishaps, critical confusion, and the occasional theatrical disaster. It’s part of what makes the history of The Ring so entertaining.
For the 150th anniversary of the first complete Ring festival in Bayreuth, we’re taking a look at some of the most memorable reactions, reviews and anecdotes surrounding those early performances. From astonished first impressions to sharp-tongued criticism, from logistical headaches to the unpredictable realities of live theater, these stories remind us that even the grandest artistic visions don’t always go according to plan.
Wagner built a revolutionary theater in a town that wasn’t equipped for the revolution he was bringing.
The composer found the quiet, provincial Bavarian town of Bayreuth perfect for his newly constructed opera house. He hoped that the location would help festival attendees focus solely on the works, distraction-free. But attendees of the festival and locals alike did not find the location ideal. Some accounts suggest that when the thousands of festivalgoers descended on Bayreuth in August 1876, the town’s population increased by 30 percent, putting an enormous burden on the limited hotels, restaurants, and transportation services. Local families reportedly vacated their own bedrooms and living rooms to rent them to guests (shades of today’s Airbnb). Restaurants struggled to feed everyone. For a town of barely 18,000 people, welcoming thousands of Wagner pilgrims was an undertaking almost as ambitious as the Ring itself.
Just scratching the surface
"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws." -- French poet Charles Baudelaire
Upon further reflection
“Wagner’s music is a beautiful sunset mistaken for a dawn.” – Claude Debussy
Not even Wagner could defy human limits.
For Wagner’s singers and musicians, putting on the Ring was also a test of endurance. The orchestra was enormous by 19th-century standards, which made it a challenge for singers to be heard. Rehearsals could go well past midnight, and exhausted actors were asked to put their bodies through physical demands unlike anything they had previously done for the theater. The Rhinemaidens of Das Rheingold, for instance, were expected to climb onto a complicated apparatus, lie on their stomachs and sing while waving their arms around as though swimming. The singers complained that the contraception made them dizzy and refused to climb onto it. They weren’t the only ones who staged a coup. The actor playing Siegmund became so angry over the rehearsal demands he stormed out of Wagner’s house after only a few days. Even though Wagner imagined things that simply hadn’t been attempted before, sometimes the performers had to remind him they were human beings, not mythological creatures.
Enduring an operatic confinement
"After the last notes of Gotterdammerung, I felt as though I had been let out of prison." -- Tchaikovsky
Wagner imagined the impossible, and reality occasionally objected.
For all of Wagner’s careful planning, the machinery and special effects did not always cooperate. The first Ring production’s elaborate mechanical contraptions, scenery and props that were invented and built specifically for the occasion sometimes arrived late, failed, or didn’t work as intended. The most famous example was the dragon Fafner in Siegfried. It was built in London and shipped to Bayreuth in pieces. However, the neck failed to arrive. The story has long been told that the missing piece was actually sent to Beirut, instead of Bayreuth. Other accounts claim the package was lost en route between London and Bayreuth. Whatever the reason for the shipping delay, the result was the same: one of opera’s most fearsome monsters made its first appearance looking considerably less terrifying than Wagner intended. Other famous technical mishaps included a miscommunication between crew members that caused the curtain to rise early on a scene change, exposing stagehands and backstage machinery to the audience, and faulty gas lighting that would fail at inopportune moments and plunge actors and audience into darkness.
Eagerly awaiting the Valkyries
"The second act is an abyss of boredom...Scenes like this recall the mediaeval torture of waking a sleeping prisoner by stabbing him with a needle at every nod..." – The influential Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick, on Die Walkure
Sometimes the most important special effect is simply remembering where you put your prop.
Arguably the most important prop in the Ring proved capable of disappearing at the worst possible moment. During Das Rheingold, the actor singing Wotan mislaid the Nibelung’s all-important ring early in the fourth scene. He had to dash backstage to search for it, creating one of those wonderfully awkward moments when the elaborate machinery, scenery, and effects of Wagner’s mythical world collided with the very ordinary realities of live theater.
The importance of the written word
In his diligence while preparing for the very first Ring, Wagner not only produced the texts for his operas, but he also hand-wrote the notices in the Festspielhaus lavatories reminding their users to "wash hands before leaving."
Begging for analysis
To this day, Wagner’s monumental cycle continues to inspire passionate devotion alongside bafflement, boredom, admiration, and everything in between. Few captured that complicated relationship better than singer and comedian Anna Russell. Her joke that, after sitting through four evenings of Wagner, “you’re exactly where you came in,” has endured because it summarizes both the absurdity and the fascination of the experience. The Ring may still divide its audiences, but we keep coming back to it. Perhaps the ultimate testament to Wagner’s achievement is that, 150 years later, we’re still arguing over it, and still telling its stories.
Before sick became a good thing
“Wagner is a great corruptor of music. He has discovered in it a means to excite weary nerves, and in so doing has made music sick.” – German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
