Teacher's Guide Cambridge Pre-U MUSIC Available for teaching ...

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Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
of the stage. It was constructed mainly of wood, partly for financial reasons but also to give the
acoustics a particular kind of resonance. The orchestra pit was built largely underneath the stage,
with only a relatively small opening into the auditorium; in addition, there was a curved screen that
hid the orchestra from view and allowed the sound to emerge indirectly; this had two effects that
Wagner considered important: the movements of conductor and orchestra were concealed from the
audience, so that they could not distract them; and the somewhat muted effect that resulted meant
that even a very large orchestra would not drown the voices on stage.
King Ludwig, throughout this time, had tried to distance himself from the entire project, still wishing
that Wagner’s festival would somehow find its home in Munich. Nevertheless, in 1874 he agreed to
lend Wagner the necessary funds to complete both the Festspielhaus and the nearby Villa Wahnfried,
into which the Wagner family moved in April. Wagner had been working steadily on the completion
of Siegfried and the composition of Götterdämmerung ever since he had returned to the Ring in
1869. He finished Siegfried in February 1871, but did not make this fact public in case King Ludwig
insisted on having it performed in Munich. The whole tetralogy was completed in November 1874,
a little more than twenty years since the first music had been written. Wagner spent the next two
years travelling across Germany to find singers, teaching them the particular style of singing he
demanded for each role and supervising the production rehearsals. The first complete performance
of the Ring took place in August 1876, conducted by Hans Richter. There were three complete cycles
and the audience was a glittering array of monarchs (including Kaiser Wilhelm I, King Ludwig II and
even the Emperor of Brazil), musicians (including Liszt, Bruckner, Grieg, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky),
philosophers (including Nietzsche) and critics (including Hanslick).
In terms of its sheer length and complexity, the Ring is a unique achievement in European art. The
length of time it took to complete (and in particular the twelve-year break in its composition) is
evident in a marked change of style between the second and third acts of Siegfried. Not only did
Wagner radically change his views about the relationship between words and music between 1857
and 1869, but his style and technique were also vastly enriched through the experience of composing
Tristan and Die Meistersinger. Whereas the earlier parts of the Ring are often somewhat terse in
their vocal lines and in the use of leitmotifs, Act III of Siegfried and the whole of Götterdämmerung
are more lyrically expansive and altogether richer in texture. The end of the cycle also underwent
significant changes. In the original conception, consistent with Wagner’s utopian ideals of the 1840s,
the final scene showed Wotan purified but remaining alive to spread a new message of hope to the
world. In its final version, consistent with the pessimism of Schopenhauer, the gods are destroyed
along with everyone and everything else: only through death can the evils of life be conquered.
The central themes of the Ring concern power, corruption, jealousy, love, betrayal, renunciation
and death. The opening scene of Das Rheingold represents the beginning of the world and the
final scene of Götterdämmerung its end. It has often been said that between these two scenes the
Ring encompasses all human experience, both good and evil. It has been interpreted in terms of a
Marxist allegory or of a struggle between a master race and those it seeks to dominate; proponents
of extreme political systems, whether of the left or right, have found in it support for their theories. It
has been viewed (notably by Robert Donington) as an artistic prototype of the psychological theories
of Carl Jung, in which various elements of the story act as archetypes and the characters represent
different aspects of a single psyche. One of the great strengths of the Ring (or its main weakness,
depending on one’s point of view) is that it contains enough ambiguities to be open to a very wide
range of different, and often opposing, interpretations.
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