Wagner and the creation of the Ring

The life of German composer Richard Wagner (1813--83) reads like a soap opera. After they married in 1836, his wife Minna left him the following year, then reconciled for a tempestuous marriage a year later. They fled Riga in 1839 because of debt and left Saxony in 1849 because Wagner supported the Revolution of 1848. His long-term affair with Cosima, the wife of his conductor Hans von Bülow, ended with him marrying her after she'd borne him three children and Minna had died. He began work on the five-opera Ring Cycle (Siegfried to Götterdämmerung) in 1848, not finishing it until 1874. The last piece, Götterdämmerung, premiered in Bayreuth in 1876. Only someone as steeped in Wagner's music as Downes (The Wagners) could have produced this book. He appreciates Wagner's innovations: using musical leitmotifs to tie together complex stories, experimenting with tonality, subordinating music to story and words, and even redesigning orchestra and theater for dramatic effect. Downes categorizes Wagner as a storyteller alongside Dickens, Hugo, and Tolstoy but also decries his virulent antisemitic tirades. VERDICT A meaty book that bursts at the seams with substance, it's held together by the author's familiarity with the subject and respect for Wagner as a composer.--David Keymer

Engaging with theRing cycle in all its rich, contradictory, and exhilarating glory. Early on, conductor Downes writes, "IfThe Ring is a great nineteenth-century story, then so too is the story of how [Richard] Wagner brought it into being." He begins in 1846 in Dresden with 32-year-old Royal Kapellmeister Wagner dealing with financial and political issues that impede his desire to create a fine orchestra and theater. He has composed excellent operas, but he's obsessed with one "on the grandest possible scale." Downes discusses how Wagner was inspired by Nordic sources, includingNibelungenlied, before touching on his antisemitism. In 1853 Wagner gives a private reading of his latest poems, with their extravagant alliteration, which contained the basis of a musical form "unlike," Downes writes, "any opera libretto that had ever previously existed," to a large audience, including his friend, Franz Liszt. The drama focuses on the gods and the necessity of their destruction, crafted while he faces financial woes and poor health. Next up is the music, beginning withDas Rheingold, which opens with "136 bars based on a single chord." Downes is meticulous and insightful in examining how Wagner creates this music with his "sonic imagination," even creating new instruments with which to play it, including anvils. Wagner is determined to make sounds never heard before.Die Walküre is completed in 1856, some five years after he first imagined it.Siegfried, a lighthearted intermezzo, separates the great tragedies ofDie Walküre andGötterdämmerung. WhenDas Rheingold was performed in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1876, Edvard Grieg, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky were in the audience. Downes includes a handy chronology and helpful synopses of the four operas. A concise, insightful, and enthusiastic foray into Wagner's magnum opus. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.