Wagner sees the bigger picture as the Ring opens in Bayreuth

‘I am toying with the boldest of plans.’ With these words, in September 1850, Richard Wagner first articulated a grand idea which took a quarter of a century to come to full fruition: the building of a special opera house in which the work eventually known as Der Ring des Nibelungen could be mounted to the highest standard.

- Terry Blain

Wagner was 37 at the time, and already thoroughly disaffected with the imperfections of theatrical life in the Germany of his period. Only a purpose-built venue, he argued, could possibly accommodate his new music drama (then a single opera entitled Siegfrieds Tod), and a certain whiff of the apocalyptic infuses Wagner's outline proposal for the project. ‘I would erect a crude theatre of boards and beams, built to my specifications,’ he wrote. Three performances would be given, free of charge, after which ‘the theatre would be torn down and my score burnt’.

Munich was at one point seriously considered as a location for Wagner's special theatre. But by 1870, when work on the Ring (by now a four-opera cycle) was moving towards completion, Wagner was no closer to finding the ideal spot to stage it. Then his wife Cosima made a suggestion. Why not look up Bayreuth in the encyclopedia? Wagner had previously spoken fondly of the small town in Bavaria, and Cosima wondered if it might possibly solve the Ring theatre conundrum.