Der Ring Des Nibelungen: Composition of The Music - Das Rheingold

The composition of Das Rheingold occupied Wagner From 1 November 1853 to 26 September 1854. He began by developing a preliminary draft (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 opening 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 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 Partiturerstschrift, a term usually reserved for Wagner's full scores: strictly speaking only the section in ink is a 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 (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 (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).