Götterdämmerung

About the work

Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) is the last of the four music dramas of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, told here in 30 scenes of about 80 seconds: the Prologue in six, then eight, seven and nine for the three acts.

Wagner composed it between 1869 and 1874. It was first performed at the first Bayreuth Festival, in the Festspielhaus, on 17 August 1876, the last night of the first complete Ring.

The Norns' rope of fate snaps. Siegfried leaves Brünnhilde the ring and travels down the Rhine to the hall of the Gibichungs, where Hagen, Alberich's son, gives him a potion that makes him forget her. Betrayed, Brünnhilde helps Hagen plot his death, and Hagen kills Siegfried on a hunt. Brünnhilde rides into his funeral pyre, the Rhine overflows and the Rhinemaidens take back the ring, and Valhalla burns with the gods inside.

Each scene plays Wagner's own notes: an excerpt of the score from the Wagner Ring Dataset (Weiß, Arifi-Müller, Krause, Zalkow, Klauk, Kleinertz and Müller; a piano reduction of the full score, CC BY 3.0), timed to the bar positions of a recorded performance, most often Georg Solti's with the Vienna Philharmonic, and played on sampled orchestral instruments. Nothing is sung: each character has a colour and an instrument, and the lights follow the notes, with the thunder, hoofbeats, clashes and fire a staged production would add. The scenes pick the most dramatic passages of each act; it is an entertaining staging, not a complete performance.

In November 2026 the four operas play on the house on the Ring nights, one opera a night in turn, at an early and a late show; the times are on Live.

The stage

From the street the porch is the back of the scene.

• Prologue, Brünnhilde's rock. The porch is the rock, its summit the middle of Porch Front, the magic fire low round it. The three Norns stand on Left, Porch Front and Right and throw the golden rope of fate between them, a line of gold running back and forth over the whole house, until it snaps. Dawn rises over every run; the Rhine Journey sends Siegfried from the summit out of the free end of Right and the river flows the length of the house.
• Act I, the hall of the Gibichungs on the Rhine. The porch is the hall, torchlit amber and royal purple; Left and Side are its far walls, Right is the riverbank, the Rhine flowing past at its free end. In its last scenes the act goes back to Brünnhilde's rock (the porch again, the fire round it).
• Act II, the shore before the hall, at night into a red dawn. The porch is the hall's doors, the wings the shore; the vassals' torches crowd the whole house in points of orange; Hagen's spear stands on Porch Front.
• Act III, a wooded valley on the Rhine, then the hall. The river runs along Right and the Side, the forest over Left; the hunt comes down out of Left. For the Funeral March the whole house is the procession. For the end the porch is the pyre: fire takes every run, Valhalla burns gold-white on the porch, and the Rhine floods the house from the free end of Right and puts the fire out.

Subjects never begin on Side (enter from the free end of Right, pop up on a front run, rise out of the porch). Every run stays lit.

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