There’s noth­ing quite as Ger­man­ic as a Wag­n­er opera, and noth­ing quite as epic as his mag­num opus, Der Ring des Nibelun­gen (The Ring of the Nibelung). The full cycle of the four parts of The Ring lasts fif­teen hours and although prag­ma­tism these days gen­er­al­ly means that just one of the parts is per­formed, I do like the idea of watch­ing it in its entire­ty. A bit like read­ing Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time in its 1.2 mil­lion word entire­ty (see my blog on that here). Nei­ther chal­lenge have I yet under­tak­en, I should say, but back in 1876, it must have been some spec­ta­cle to have attend­ed the famous Bayreuth Fes­ti­val, when the full cycle was per­formed for the first time, over four days: Das Rhein­gold (The Rhine­gold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Göt­ter­däm­merung (Twi­light of the Gods)

The opera is loose­ly based on char­ac­ters from Ger­man­ic and Norse hero­ic leg­end and cen­tres around the epony­mous mag­ic ring that grants domin­ion over the world and how it is fought over by gen­er­a­tions of gods, heroes and myth­i­cal crea­tures, until the final cat­a­clysm at the end of the Göt­ter­däm­merung. The com­plex­i­ty of the epic tale is matched by the increas­ing com­plex­i­ty of the music as it pro­gress­es, and Wag­n­er wrote for such a gar­gan­tu­an orches­tra that a spe­cial pur­pose-built the­atre was built at Bayreuth.

The piece that we all know is the Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre, con­tain­ing that rous­ing leit­mo­tif as the Valkyrie sis­ters of Norse mythol­o­gy (“choosers of the slain”) trans­port the fall­en heroes to Val­hal­la. The music was used in Apoc­a­lypse Now (1979) where it was played on heli­copter-mount­ed loud­speak­ers dur­ing the Amer­i­can assault on Viet­cong-con­trolled vil­lages. And just recent­ly, in the excel­lent and grit­ti­ly hon­est TV doc­u­men­tary film, Our Falk­lands War: A Front­line Sto­ry, it was revealed that it was sim­i­lar­ly played loud­ly over the tan­noy as 2 Para were get­ting into the land­ing craft in prepa­ra­tion for their first assault on the Falk­land Islands.

Here’s a ver­sion from the BBC Proms, best enjoyed from a sofa rather than a land­ing craft.