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Maazel had been the first American to conduct at Bayreuth—the purpose-built theater Wagner had constructed for the special conditions he believed were necessary for performances of the Ring in particular—and recalled a pivotal encounter he once had with Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, in which the latter observed that “the orchestra [is] where it all is: the text behind the text.”

For Maazel, this view proved especially apt with regard to the Ring. “Its orchestral score,” Maazel noted, “is the Ring itself, coded in sound. Decoded, it becomes story, legend, song, philosophy in countless cosmic overtones and human undertones.” The Ring Without Words surveys some of the glories of Wagner’s orchestral score. There is, of course, no substitute for the full experience of the staged Ring in live performance. But to follow this orchestral journey is to gain a hint of the scope and gripping power of Wagner’s vision.

What makes the concept of a “Ring without words” possible in the first place is Wagner’s radical reconception of the role of the orchestra in opera. This goes beyond his famous system of leitmotifs, a technique anyone who loves movies has experienced, as it has long since been appropriated in film scores: brief bits of musical material—melodic fragments, harmonies, rhythms, or a combination of these—that evoke a specific character, object, or even idea (fate, the innocence of nature). Wagner transformed the orchestra itself into a protagonist—or, more accurately, into an omniscient narrator (and perceptive psychoanalyst) that weaves a rich web of commentary and observation. It often already “knows” what the characters have yet to discover.

The orchestral apparatus is significantly expanded beyond the standard 19th-century ensemble. The brass and wind sections alone are enormous, calling for eight horns—a sonority we hear in the opening of the Ring. The double basses intone a sustained E-flat that forms the bedrock to the cycle’s very first leitmotif, pronounced by the horn section in a chain of repetitions that prefigure Minimalism. This primal theme becomes associated with water and the elemental power of unsullied nature.

Das Rheingold introduces the epic range of the Ring’s world. The opening scene dramatizes a situation of primal innocence—a pagan Garden of Eden—in which the Rhinemaidens are tasked with guarding the river’s gold in its natural state. But they foolishly enable the original sin that sets the entire narrative in motion by alerting the interloping Nibelung Alberich that to forswear love will allow him to forge an all-empowering Ring from that gold. This is precisely what Alberich proceeds to do, with the intention of enslaving his fellow creatures and even the gods.

Maazel’s arrangement hints at the extent of this cosmos, moving from the realm of the gods aloft, for whose security Wotan, their chief, has built the splendid new castle Valhalla, to the depths of the mines where the Nibelungs, expert miners, are forced by Alberich into slave labor.

Maazel uses the thread of Wagner’s storm motifs as a transition into Die Walküre’s opening love story. Here we meet the first humans, offspring of Wotan and a mortal mother. Wotan intends to use his son Siegmund to regain control of the Ring, which he had stolen from Alberich but then reluctantly gave up in order to pay the debt owed for building Valhalla. Siegmund, a refugee who finds shelter from a kind woman in a violent storm, discovers she is his long-lost twin sister Sieglinde. The pair fall in love and Siegmund helps Sieglinde escape her brutal husband, but he is fated to be slaughtered when Wotan can no longer offer him protection. The humans’ transgression of marital laws must be punished, argues Wotan’s wife Fricka, lest the god’s own authority crumble.

This dilemma is the central dramatic conflict of Die Walküre. Wotan’s favorite daughter Brünnhilde, one of the Valkyries he has sired to help him gather dead warriors to protect Valhalla, had been chosen to protect Siegmund but must now allow him to die in battle. But her encounter with the human couple so moves Brünnhilde that she decides to disobey her father. He descends on the scene and thwarts her intervention, ensuring that Siegmund’s fate is carried out—and it breaks his heart.

Brünnhilde’s disobedience meanwhile has enraged Wotan. She flees with Sieglinde to protect her, informing the mortal woman that she is now pregnant with the future Siegfried. Maazel continues with the storm theme by including “The Ride of the Valkyries,” the most-famous part of the entire Ring. The prelude to the final act, this music depicts the Valkyries in action as they gather corpses from the battlefield and are then faced with the storm of Wotan’s wrath as he searches for Brünnhilde.

Wotan’s punishment is to remove the immortality of his wayward daughter and put her into a sleep, making Brünnhilde vulnerable to whoever first encounters her. But he is persuaded to soften this sentence by surrounding Brünnhilde with a ring of fire, so that only a hero “who does not know fear” can pass. Wagner wrote some of the Ring’s most magnificent and moving music to depict the god’s elegiac farewell. In itself a wonderfully symphonic passage, this culmination of Die Walküre intricately weaves together Wotan’s resigned leave-taking with the restless motif of fire and the hypnotic, lullaby-like idea signifying Brünnhilde’s sleep.

Siegfried grafts a fairy-tale atmosphere onto the essentially tragic mythic structure of the entire Ring. Alberich’s Nibelung brother Mime, who has raised Siegfried ever since he came upon the dying Sieglinde in the forest, plans to use the young hero to forge his father’s broken sword. Mime’s ulterior motive is to get him to slay the dragon guarding the Ring (which Wotan had given up as payment), after which he will poison Siegfried. Wagner contrasts the fear Mime experiences after losing a riddle contest with Wotan (visiting the earth in disguise as a Wanderer) with Siegfried’s fearless determination to head off on the adventures he has been told about since his earliest days—such as the story of the dragon guarding a priceless treasure. To accomplish this, he successfully forges the broken sword anew.

In a brief but intensely beautiful passage (“Forest Murmurs”), Siegfried ruminates on the mother he never knew. Shimmering, rapturous figures in the strings, with melodies foregrounded in the winds, represent the young hero’s moment of communing with a still-unspoiled nature. But he accidentally awakens the dragon, easily slays the beast, and hears the dragon’s lament—though he pays no heed to its warning of the curse that had been placed on the Ring.

The rest of The Ring without Words presents material from the cycle’s mammoth final opera, Götterdämmerung. Siegfried’s ignorance of fear had allowed him, in the final act of his namesake opera, to discover Brünnhilde behind her curtain of fire and to awaken her into her full humanity. Their love story inspires some of Wagner’s most exuberant and luxuriously orchestrated music. The power of their love dispels the cloud of doom with which Götterdämmerung began: as day breaks, the orchestra reveals how radically that love has transformed both of them. Siegfried’s naïve horn motif takes on a maturely heroic cast, suggested by full brass harmonization and an arresting shift in rhythmic emphasis. Brünnhilde retains her association with the energetic Valkyrie motif, but it is now eclipsed and filled out by a lyrical new idea—one of the Ring’s loveliest (first spelled out by clarinet)—evoking her newfound humanity and vulnerability.

Brünnhilde encourages Siegfried to embark on new adventures, but his very first trip to explore the civilization further down the Rhine is what leads to his downfall. He encounters his nemesis, Hagen—Alberich’s human son and part of the Nibelung’s plan to regain the Ring—who has already plotted Siegfried’s destruction. His ominous call to his clan is a violent counterpart to the hero’s horn call.

Maazel segues into music from the final act, in which Siegfried encounters the Rhinemaidens (not seen since their loss of the gold in Das Rheingold) and dismisses their warnings to free himself of the Ring and its curse by returning it to them. The grand climax of the entire cycle then unfolds with the Funeral March for Siegfried, whose murder Hagen efficiently engineers, and Brünnhilde’s reaction.

Before returning the cursed Ring to its rightful place and sacrificing herself in the funeral pyre of her slaughtered husband, Brünnhilde has come to understand how her father Wotan’s crime led to Siegfried’s betrayal and how the entire regime of the gods must now accept its demise as the world is cleansed of the curse. The fire that will engulf her and Siegfried’s corpse symbolizes this necessary cycle of destruction and renewal.

In both the Funeral March and at the end of Brünnhilde’s so-called Immolation Scene, Wagner gives the orchestra full rein to reflect on what has happened. The Ring in its original form ends not with words but with a symphonic juxtaposition of motifs representing the Rhinemaidens, Valhalla now set ablaze, Siegfried, and a radiant theme that sails high in violins and flutes, glorifying Brünnhilde and the transformative power of her love for Siegfried.

By the later stages of the Ring’s creation, Brünnhilde had replaced Siegfried as the true heroic center of the cycle for Wagner, with Wotan as its tortured protagonist—and self-portrait. The Ring condenses sunset and sunrise into the final measures, ending on a decidedly conclusive chord from which, at the same time, the hope of a new beginning is felt to emanate.