Siegfried

About the work

Siegfried is the third of the four music dramas of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, told here in 30 scenes of about 80 seconds, ten to an act.

Wagner composed it in two stretches, 1856 to 1857 and 1869 to 1871, setting the cycle aside in between. It was first performed at the first Bayreuth Festival, in the Festspielhaus, on 16 August 1876.

Siegfried, son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, is raised in the forest by the dwarf Mime. He forges the broken sword Nothung anew, kills the giant Fafner, who guards the gold in the shape of a dragon, and takes the ring. A woodbird leads him to the rock where Brünnhilde sleeps; he breaks the Wanderer's spear, walks through the fire and wakes her.

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.

• Act I, Mime's cave in the forest. The forge is the porch: Porch Front is the anvil, white-hot where the hammer lands, and Porch Left and Right are the chimney walls glowing with the fire. Left and Right are the cave mouth and the forest outside. Siegfried comes in from the free end of Right.
• Act II, the forest outside Fafner's cave. The porch is the cave mouth, black with two red eyes when the dragon wakes. Left, Right and Side are the forest: hard green with gold shafts of light moving through. The Woodbird is one hot magenta point that darts anywhere on the roofline.
• Act III, the foot of Brünnhilde's rock, then the summit. Erda rises out of the porch; the Wanderer stands across the path on Right. The fire is the Walküre's: it rings the porch exactly as WK30 left it, and Siegfried goes through it to the summit (middle of Porch Front) where Brünnhilde sleeps. Her awakening turns the whole house from fire to sunrise.

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.

Who is who