Der Ring ohne Worte

Is it possible to compress the almost fifteen hours of Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen into the length of a Bruckner symphony and completely dispense with the sung text? The concept is not as heretical as it initially appears and is also not a completely new idea: Leopold Stockovsky was perhaps the most prominent conductor prior to Lorin Maazel to have successfully undertaken this fascinating experiment.

In Maazel’s Ring without words, the dispensation with the text does not imply a loss of musical substance, as Wagner frequently doubled and supported the vocal line with orchestral instruments. In passages where this is not the case, Maazel assigns the vocal parts to additional instruments which are associated with specific characters: the flute represents Sieglinde, Siegmund and Siegfried are characterised by the trombone and the bass clarinet is utilised as the personification of Fafner. The musical structure adheres strictly to the chronological order of the four operas from the Vorspiel to the first scene of Rheingold to the final bars of Götterdämmerung without the inclusion of a single extra bar which does not originate from Wagner himself to smooth the seams.