Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring) is a huge music drama in four parts, stretching over four separate nights of three to five hours each. This work, a quarter century in the making, counts as the supreme example of the Romantic tendency toward the grandiose (see page 230). The Ring (as it is commonly called) grew so large because of the sprawling material Wagner wanted to cover, large portions of the most famous of all Germanic or Norse legends. It involves gods and goddesses, giants and dwarfs, magical prophecies and transformations, a dragon, an invisibility cloak that lives on in Harry Potter novels — and, in the midst of it all, very human feelings and actions. The Ring counts as one of the towering artworks of all time, comparable to the Taj Mahal, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (comparisons the megalomaniac Wagner would have enjoyed).

The first night, Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), shows us events whose consequences will be played out over the following three nights: A precious lump of gold at the bottom of the Rhine River is stolen from its rightful owners, the mermaids of the Rhine, by the dwarf Alberich, and then is taken again from him by the gods. The stolen gold, forged into the ring of Wagner’s title by the dwarfs whom Alberich commands, carries with it a curse. It makes all who possess it, even Wotan, the leader of the gods, renounce the love that could save them from its corruption. Love is meant here in the broadest sense, to include human compassion in all its forms. Over the following three nights of The Ring — Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) — generations pass. We see the gods, humans, and dwarfs — and a giant transformed into a dragon — brought to grief by their lust for the gold. An innocent hero, Siegfried, is born who can defy the gods and their corrupt order, but even he dies through treachery arising from everyone else’s pursuit of the ring.

Wagner employs all this elaborate mythology to tell a simple modern tale. His basic theme is the moral decline of the world, brought about by greed for money and hunger for power. In the guise of Norse gods, gnomes, and warriors, one group after another of nineteenth-century society is shown destroying itself in the pursuit of gold. Even the renunciation of love entailed in possessing the ring is an allegory, turning the old myth into an indictment of modern bourgeois biases toward work and discipline and away from emotion.