Culture | Richard Wagner’s “Ring”

Playing with fire

Aug 3rd 2000|

“I KNOW now that I and my work have no place in these times of ours,” moaned Richard Wagner after the first performances of his “Der Ring des Nibelungen” (The Ring of the Nibelung) at the Bayreuth festival in 1876. In his view the staging had been a shambles, the conductor, Hans Richter, had not got a single tempo right and big chunks of the marathon work needed re-writing. To cap it all the festival ended with a whopping deficit. Wagner, then aged 63, told his wife Cosima he wished he were dead. He lived on for seven years but the “Ring” was not given again at Bayreuth for another 20.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Playing with fire”