I understand perfectly when a musician says today, “I hate Wagner, but I can no longer endure any other music.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, Ein Bühnfestspiel für drei Tage und einen Vorabend (“A Theater Festival Play for Three Days and a Preliminary Evening”) was composed over a period of twenty-six years. Four operas constitute the work: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (“The Twilight of the Gods”). As suggested by the subtitle, Wagner intended the work to be presented over four days.

Though composed in sequence musically, the libretto of The Ring was written in reverse order. By November 1848, the composer had completed a long poem he called Siegfrieds Tod (“Siegfried’s Death”), more or less similar to the present-day Götterdämmerung. Wagner quickly realized that the complexities of Siegfrieds Tod could not be accommodated in a single work. In 1851, he wrote a “prequel” called Der junge Siegfried (“The Young Siegfried”) which corresponds to Siegfried, the work for the third day. Wagner extended his dramatic foundations even further with texts for Die Walküre and the prefatory Das Rheingold, finishing the poem in December 1852. Initially, Wagner made rapid progress with the music. Das Rheingold was finished by mid-1854, Die Walküre by spring 1856, and much of Siegfried by mid-1857. By that point, however, Wagner was wrung out. Siegfried was not to be completed for more than twelve years; Götterdämmerungwas completed five years after that,