Composer: Richard Wagner was born May 22, 1813, Leipzig: died February 13, 1883, Venice Henk de Vlieger was born on April 7, 1953 in Schiedam, The Netherlands
Work composed: de Vlieger made his arrangement of Wagner’s Ring cycle for orchestra in 1991, on a commission from the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra for their German tour in 1992. Dedicated to conductor Edo de Waart.
World premiere: The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic gave the premiere and recorded this version in 1992
Instrumentation: piccolo, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 8 horns (including four Wagner tubas), 3 trumpets, bass trumpet, 3 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, 2 timpani, 3 anvils, crash cymbals, glockenspiel, large tenor drum, tam tam, triangle, 2 or 3 harps, and strings
Estimated duration: 70 minutes

Dutch percussionist and music arranger Henk de Vlieger describes his arrangement of orchestral music from Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle as an “orchestral adventure” which “unites the most important orchestral parts of the Ring in order to create a solid one-part symphonic work” in which “the main plot lines, as in a symphonic poem, are clearly recognizable.” Distilling approximately 15 hours of music from four separate operas into one 70-minute orchestral suite is a monumental undertaking, and if reviews are to be believed, a successful one.

On his website, Vlieger writes, “The Ring of the Nibelung … is a story of love and romance, of lust for power and intrigue, and courage and self-sacrifice. At the same time, it is a story about the balance of nature and the disasters which will afflict the earth if greed should disturb this balance. In this sense, The Ring of the Nibelung can be described as a kind of protest theatre, an environmental opera ahead of its time. The composer, Richard Wagner, initially designed the libretto for a big heroic opera entitled Siegfried’s Death. While he was working on this, however, he came to the conclusion that the story was so extensive that one opera would not be sufficient. The one opera became four: The Rheingold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods. Together they make up the cycle The Ring of the Nibelung.

“For the narrative of The Ring … Wagner drew mainly on the Icelandic Edda poems and the Burgundian Nibelungen saga. The protagonists from both cultures – Sigurd and Siegfried – were combined into one superhero. Scandinavian gods were given German names; and the story includes not only water-nymphs, dwarfs, giants, demi-gods, and a dragon but also real people. The literary quality of the libretti, which permit a wide variety of interpretations, has often been criticized. However, the story told in The Ring is expressed more in the music than in the text. It is through the overwhelmingly dramatic and visual power of the music that The Ring is continually able to excite whole new generations of listeners.

“A characteristic feature of the musical style is the technique, developed by Wagner, of the leitmotifs: short musical phrases representing a person, object, or idea. These leitmotifs play an important role as orientation points in The Ring's fifteen-hour-long ocean of sound and form an ingenious web in which the dramatic development is made audible.”

Vlieger’s arrangement has four movements, which correspond to the four operas of the Ring, and each movement is subdivided into titled but continuous sub-sections:

Introduction
Das Rheingold
Nibelheim
Valhalla
The Valkyries
Magic Fire Music
Forest Idyll
Siegfried’s Heroic Deed
Brünnhilde’s Awakening
Siegfried and Brünnhilde
Siegfried’s Rhine Journey
Siegfried’s death
Funeral Music
Brünnhilde’s immolation

© Elizabeth Schwartz