THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG
By HENRY T. FINCK
Music Editor of the New York Evening Post, Author of “Life of Richard Wagner” and many other works
MENTOR GRAVURES
RICHARD WAGNER By Franz von Lenbach
RICHARD WAGNER’S DREAM By Schweninger
SIEGFRIED SLAYS THE DRAGON By K. Dielitz
MENTOR GRAVURES
WOTAN’S FAREWELL By K. Dielitz
BRÜNNHILDE SLUMBERING GUARDED BY MAGIC FIRE By Hermann Hendrich
THE VALKYR’S RIDE By K. Dielitz
BRÜNNHILDE
From a Painting by S. de Ivanowski, studied from Mdme. Olive Fremstad
THE MENTOR · DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC · FEBRUARY 1, 1916
Entered at the Postoffice at New York, N. Y., as second-class matter. Copyright, 1916, by The Mentor Association, Inc.
In the leading operatic centers the four music dramas constituting Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung are often performed separately; but once a year—sometimes twice—they are all given within a week or two, in proper order,—“Rheingold,” “Walküre” (vol-keer-a), “Siegfried” (seeg-freed), and “Götterdämmerung” (get-ter-dem-mer-ung) as a special “Nibelung cycle,”—and such a cycle is looked on by the highest class of music lovers as a great festival, and is followed with concentrated attention in all its wonderful details.
Wagner himself gave his “Ring” (as it is often called for short) the subtitle “Bühnenfestspiel” (bee-nen-fest-speel), or stage-festival play. It was in the summer of 1876 that he first gave it to the world, in a specially constructed theater in Bayreuth, Bavaria; and he did this in accordance with a plan conceived by him as a necessity more than a quarter of a century before.
To understand why he regarded such a festival as a necessity we must know something about the operatic situation at the time when he composed this colossal and revolutionary work. The originators of Italian opera, who lived at Florence three centuries ago, held that the play (or libretto) in an opera was as important as the music. In their eagerness to make it possible for the hearer to understand every word of the text they banished all flowing melody in favor of a dry recitative, halfway between speech and song, one of them actually boasting of their “noble contempt for melody.”
INTERIOR, BAYREUTH OPERA HOUSE
This, naturally, led to a reaction, which went so far to the side of melody that finally nobody listened except when the prima donna or the tenor sang a brilliant aria, the play being entirely ignored.
FELIX MOTTL
One of the leading conductors at the early festival performances at Bayreuth
Efforts to curb the singers and restore the play to honor were made by several composers, the most important of them being Gluck (1714-1787). So thoroughly was he imbued with the importance of the play in an opera that he once wrote, “Before I begin to work I try to forget above all things that I am a musician.” Yet in his operas, too, the arias remain the principal points of interest, as they do in the operas of his successors, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Mozart, Weber.
DR. HANS RICHTER
The famous conductor, in charge of the orchestral forces at Bayreuth in 1876 and after
Moreover—and this is the most important point—in Gluck’s operas, as Wagner himself pointed out in 1850, “aria, recitative, and ballet, each complete in itself, stand as unconnected side by side as they did before him, and still do, almost always, to the present day.”
It was this defect of the opera—this incoherence of its parts—that Wagner set himself the task of remedying. The result was the Music Drama—the “Artwork of the Future,” as exemplified in the Ring of the Nibelung as well as in “Tristan and Isolde,” “Die Meistersinger” (mice-ter-singer), and “Parsifal.”