The composition of the epic operatic tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung occupied Richard Wagner for more than a quarter of a century. Conceived around 1848, the work was not finished until 1874, less than two years before the entire cycle was given its premiere at Bayreuth. Most of this time was devoted to the composition of the music, the text having been largely completed in about four years.
Like his libretti, Wagner's operatic scores generally passed through a series of distinct stages from sketch to fair copy; but because the composer altered his method of musical composition several times during the writing of the Ring, there is not the same uniformity in the evolution of the music that we find in the texts. Furthermore, it was often Wagner's practice to work on two or more drafts of a work at the same time, switching back and forth between them as the fancy took him. Consequently, it is all but impossible to make definitive statements about the exact order in which the various themes, leitmotifs and instrumentations were arrived at. Each score, however, did pass through at least three stages, there being seven possible stages in all:
It took Wagner just over four years to complete the text of his Ring cycle (1848–1852). The composition of the music, however, would occupy him, on and off, for almost a quarter of a century. In the summer of 1850 he actually began to compose music for the prologue of German: Siegfried's Tod (Siegfried's Death, as Götterdämmerung was originally called) before he had even conceived of the Ring cycle itself. This effort, however, was premature and Wagner abandoned the work near the beginning of the second scene, in which Siegfried takes his leave of Brünnhilde.
The following summer Wagner made another abortive attempt to compose music for his gradually emerging operatic cycle. Only a handful of sketches survive for German: Der junge Siegfried (The Young Siegfried, as Siegfried was originally called). Some of these were later drawn upon when Wagner came to compose Siegfried proper in 1856.
A few other sketches survive from these early years. On 23 July 1851 Wagner wrote down on a loose sheet of paper what was to become the best-known leitmotif in the entire cycle: the theme from the "Ride of the Valkyries" ("Walkürenritt"). Other early sketches for Die Walküre were made in the summer of 1852. There also exist three sets of isolated musical sketches for Das Rheingold which were composed between 15 September 1852 and November 1853. The first of these was entered into the verse draft of the text, the second into Wagner's copy of the 1853 printing of the text; the third was written on an undated sheet of music paper. All three were subsequently used by Wagner.
The idea for the prelude of Das Rheingold famously came to Wagner in a "vision" he had on 5 September 1853 as he lay in a semi-conscious state in an inn at La Spezia, Italy:
After a night spent in fever and sleeplessness, I forced myself to take a long tramp the next day through the hilly country, which was covered with pine woods. It all looked dreary and desolate, and I could not think what I should do there. Returning in the afternoon, I stretched myself, dead tired, on a hard couch, awaiting the long-desired hour of sleep. It did not come; but I fell into a kind of somnolent state, in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water. The rushing sound formed itself in my brain into a musical sound, the chord of E-flat major, which continually re-echoed in broken forms; these broken chords seemed to be melodic passages of increasing motion, yet the pure triad of E-flat major never changed, but seemed by its continuance to impart infinite significance to the element in which I was sinking. I awoke in sudden terror from my doze, feeling as though the waves were rushing high above my head. I at once recognised that the orchestral overture to the Rheingold, which must long have lain latent within me, though it had been unable to find definite form, had at last been revealed to me.
However, it was not until 1 November 1853, at his lodgings in Zurich, that he finally sat down and began the first continuous musical draft of the tetralogy. Five and a half years had passed since he had completed his last opera, Lohengrin.
The composition of Das Rheingold occupied Wagner from 1 November 1853 to 26 September 1854. He began by developing a preliminary draft (German: Gesamtentwurf) of the entire work from his sketches. This 77-page draft, which was written in pencil and on two (sometimes three) staves, was completed by 14 January 1854. The following month (1 February) he proceeded to make a second complete draft. It seems that his first intention was to make a composition draft in ink, just as he had done for Lohengrin, but as such a draft of the prelude – which consists of little more than an arpeggiated E major triad – would have been to all intents and purposes a full score, he decided to skip the intermediate stage and draft the full score in ink right away. This he proceeded to do with the prelude, significantly revising some of its details in the process. When, however, he reached the beginning of scene 1, he found that the remainder of the opera required too much revision and elaboration to allow him to develop a full score without first making a second complete draft. He therefore abandoned the full score in ink and proceeded to develop instead an instrumentation draft in pencil, in which he worked out most of the vocal and orchestral details of the four remaining scenes. This German: Instrumentationsskizze, as Wagner himself styled it, was completed by 28 May 1854.
Two things should be noted about the second complete draft of Das Rheingold. Firstly, the full score of the prelude (in ink) and the instrumentation draft of the remainder of the opera (in pencil) together constitute a single manuscript (WWV 86A Musik III). In WWV this is called a German: Partiturerstschrift, a term usually reserved for Wagner's full scores: strictly speaking only the section in ink is a German: Partiturerstschrift. Secondly, the manuscript is fragmentary: thirty-three measures are missing, which include the closing measures of the prelude and the opening measures of scene 1. As ink is used before this lacuna and pencil after it, it is generally assumed that Wagner switched from one medium to the other at the entrance of the voices (i.e. the first measure of scene 1); but until and unless the missing sheets are recovered, this must remain an assumption.
The final stage of the compositional process was the writing out in ink of a fair copy of the full score (German: Reinschrift der Partitur). This task was begun by Wagner himself on 15 February 1854, while he was still at work on the instrumentation draft. It was delayed, however, by his decision to start work on Die Walküre (28 June 1854). Sometime in the summer of 1854 he hired a copyist to make a fair copy in ink of Das Rheingold (using his own unfinished fair copy as a model), but the copyist's work was so full of blunders that Wagner was forced to dismiss him and resume work on his own copy. He worked at it on and off for several months, alternating this work with the ongoing composition of Die Walküre. By 25 September 1854 the fair copy of Das Rheingold was finally completed. Wagner then sent it to the Dresden copyist Friedrich Wölfel, who completed a beautiful and very accurate ink copy on 11 November 1855. Wöfel's copy was used as the source-text (German: Stichvorlage) for the first public printing of the complete opera in 1873.
Wagner gave his own fair copy to his patron Ludwig II of Bavaria as a birthday gift on 25 August 1865, and it eventually found its way into the king's family archives. More than half a century later it was purchased by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce and presented to Adolf Hitler on the occasion of the Führer's fiftieth birthday (20 April 1939). During the latter stages of the war Hitler kept it with him in his bunker at Berlin. It was destroyed (along with the autograph scores of Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi, and the fair copy of Die Walküre) shortly before the fall of Berlin in May 1945 (though a number of conspiracy theories continue to claim otherwise).
As we have seen, Wagner sketched out the theme for the Ride of the Valkyries on 23 July 1851; other than this, the earliest musical sketches for Die Walküre date from the summer of 1852. But it was not until 28 June 1854 that Wagner began to transform these into a complete draft of all three acts of the opera. This preliminary draft (German: Gesamtentwurf), which was completed by 27 December 1854, was written in pencil and shows a greater degree of orchestral elaboration than the corresponding draft of Das Rheingold.
In January 1855 Wagner proceeded to compose the full score without bothering to write an intermediate instrumentation draft as he had done for Das Rheingold. This was a decision he was soon to regret, as numerous interruptions made the task of orchestrating the German: Gesamtentwurf an exceedingly difficult one. If he allowed too much time to elapse between the initial drafting of a passage and its later elaboration, he found that he could not remember how he had intended to orchestrate the draft. Consequently, some passages had to be composed again from scratch. Wagner, nevertheless, persevered with the task and the full score was finally completed on 20 March 1856. The fair copy was begun on 14 July 1855 in the Swiss resort of Seelisberg, where Wagner and his wife spent a month. It was completed in Zurich on 23 March 1856, just three days after the completion of the full score.
In September or October 1854 the German poet and political activist Georg Herwegh introduced Wagner to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's pessimistic and renunciatory philosophy had a profound effect on Wagner, and it was only to be expected that it should influence the composition of the Ring.