The REAL Lord of the Rings... Trivia Quiz

Answer: He and King Mark both set traps to catch their wives "in flagrante dilecto"

Both went on fake "hunting trips", and both came back to find their wives in an uncompromising position. In Gesualdo's case, however, the outcome was different. He had his servants kill the lover while he himself stabbed his wife dozens of times, then had their bodies dumped on the steps of his ducal palace (he was Prince of Venosa and a relative of the pope, I think) to show what happens when you cross a Gesualdo. For good measure he had her child, who he suspected was her lover's rather than his, suffocated.

He then went into hiding for two years, not for fear of the forces of justice, but for fear of his wife's relatives. Pleasant kinda chap, was he not?

Answer: History

More specifically, he rejected grand opera on historical subjects. He said that history was specific, whereas myth was universal, and thus better suited to musico-dramatic treatment. This rejection included his own "Lohengrin". In doing so, he went further and claimed to reject opera as a whole; he henceforth aimed at a new kind of stage work which, in the absence of a more appropriate name, he called a "drama".

His justification for this new form is contained in his theoretical work "Opera and Drama" of 1852, where we find his famous (to Wagnerians, anyway!) aphorism: "...the error in the genre of Opera is this: that a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means..." Of course, as in so many of his utterances he was somewhat inconsistent: he wrote one of the greatest comic operas of all time, "Die Meistersinger" - firmly set in 16th century Nuremberg and using historical characters and situations - after supposedly rejecting historical subject matter.

Answer: The Boy who Set Out to Learn to Fear

Wagner wrote to Uhlig on about 10th May 1851 regarding the "lively subject" about which he, Wagner, had once written him of "the youth who sets out to 'learn what fear is' and is so stupid that he never manages to learn. Imagine how startled I was when I realised that this youth is none other than - the young Siegfried, who wins the Hoard and awakens Bruennhilde!" At least according to this letter, this was the realisation that led to the writing of "Der Junge Siegfried". ("Stupid" in the fairy tale translates into "naive" in the opera.)

Of course, other fairy tales are echoed in the "Ring". The ending of "Siegfried", combined with that of "Die Walkuere", is in fact Sleeping Beauty complete with Beauty's protective terrors which are no terrors for the chosen one, while Loge gets the ring off Alberich in scene 3 of "Das Rheingold" by the same ruse that Puss-in-Boots uses on the giant. This isn't necessarily to say that Wagner used these sources directly. What it does show is how universal some themes are. "The 1001 Nights", Grimm's Fairy Tales, Wagner's "Ring" and "Tristan" - they all tell many of the same stories, sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in quite different ones.

I've heard it said that there are only so many truly original stories in the world, and that every "new" story is basically a retelling of one of these. The number "so many" I've heard once as six and once as about thirty. Food for thought, no? Try this: Jane Austen's "Pride & Prejudice" = "Beauty and the Beast".

Answer: False

This common oversimplification is so gross and has been repeated so often that it amounts to a myth.

In April 1848, before he had even finished "Lohengrin", Wagner wrote to his friend Eduard Devrient that he was considering an opera on the Siegfried saga. On October 4th that year, Wagner finished "The Nibelungen myth as a sketch for a drama", his prose resume of the whole story of what is now the "Ring". Within days he completed a prose draft of an opera called "Siegfried's Tod" ("Siegfried's Death", the last part of the prose sketch, equivalent to our "Goetterdaemmerung") and then, about six weeks later, a draft libretto. He got as far as a musical sketch for the music of the Norns' part of the prologue in 1850.

In May 1851 he decided that the material presented as back-narration in "Siegfried's Tod" had better be presented on stage. In May he sketched the scenario for "Der Junge Siegfried" (now "Siegfried"), and the following month wrote the libretto (oops, sorry, poem). And that, he thought, was that, except for writing the music.

But the Nibelungen subject insisted on following its own logic, and the following year he took the momentous decision to present the whole myth on stage, which involved extensive rewriting of what he'd already written. The poem of "Die Walkuere" was finished on 1st July 1852 and that of "Das Rheingold" on 3rd November that same year. In late 1853 he started writing the music, which he most definitely did in the "correct" order, starting with the first opera in the cycle.

So, to summarise, only one constituent element was written "backwards": the poems of the operas. Both the whole scenario and the music were written in the correct order.

As a small illustration of the inconsistencies which arose from the rewrites, in Act I of "Siegfried" Mime tells the hero that his (Siegfried's) mother Sieglinde gave Mime the broken pieces of the sword Nothung, whereas later in the act he declares in response to the Wanderer's last question: "Accursed steel; I wish I had never stolen it!" - which is exactly what he did in the 1848 sketch, in which Wagner didn't include Mime's upbringing of Siegfried. He introduced these details in "Der Junge Siegfried", complete with inconsistencies, which he subsequently missed when he revised the drama as "Siegfried". These inconsistencies, I believe, could not have been ironed out, not so much because of the complexity of the cycle, but rather because of all the changes it went through, especially its expansion from the original two operas to include "Die Walkuere" and "Das Rheingold". It would have required at least someone in the order of a minor deity like Froh to keep track of them all, but in any case the emphasis of the story had also changed from optimism (in the earlier versions, Wotan's error is redeemed as the Ring returns to the Rhine, and the gods (and, for that matter, the Nibelungs) are freed from the effects of the Curse) to the present nihilistic pessimism. I think these elements are essentially irreconcileable, and consequently at least some of the Ring's inconsistencies are, too.

Answer: False

He doesn't in fact realise that he's Sieglinde's twin brother until right at the end of the act, when she tells him. Someone, I forget who, adduces this as an example of how Wagner can easily trick you into hearing something you haven't actually heard.

In fact, Siegmund's song is an apostrophe to brother Love and sister Spring kissing each other. A marvellous irony, that, but no more than irony.

Answer: Isolde

All three children were born to Cosima, who was married at the time to Hans von Buelow. Isolde was born in 1865, on the day of the first orchestral rehearsal for "Tristan" in Munich, conducted by Cosima's cuckolded husband; daughter Eva was born in 1867, while Wagner was working on (you guessed it!) "Die Meistersinger"; and Siegfried in 1869, a year after Cosima left poor Hansie and moved into the villa Triebschen, by Lake Geneva, with her tricky Dickie. In 1870, Hans granted her a divorce, and she finally married her Richard that same year.

Hans von Buelow, who had such an inferiority complex that he had told Cosima before they were married that if she found him unacceptable he would give her up, went on to become a leading conductor of the symphonies of Brahms, Wagner's archenemy in the Germany of the 1860s-1880s. His personal experience may or may not be significant in this apparent change of allegiance, wink wink nudge nudge.

Answer: Vienna

This was due to the tenor Alois Anders' failure to memorise a single note of his part despite having studied it for months! It's not as if he was unused to Wagner - the composer chose him on the strength of his performance in "Lohengrin" (or it may have been "Tannhaueser" - I'm not sure).

But the relative atonality of "Tristan" was obviously too much for him. I've also tried to track down a story I've read that the Vienna Philharmonic tried the "Tristan" prelude sixty times in rehearsal and declared it unplayable. Only three years later, the opera was perfectly successfully performed in Munich - but the lead tenor, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, died shortly after (in fact from a chill caught on stage), so the myth of the opera's unperformability became transformed into its alleged lethality.

Answer: Hagen

"Zuruck vom Ring!" ("Get back from the ring!") cries Hagen, as he tries to grab it from the Rhinemaidens - but, like water nixies, they seize him and drag him to his doom in the overflowing Rhine.

Answer: half-nephew

Wotan is Siegfried's grandfather by a mortal woman. At the same time, he is Bruennhilde's father by Erda. If Wotan had borne both by the same woman, Siegfried would have been her full nephew. Seems like Siegmund and Sieglinde weren't the only incestuous ones!

Answer: The Ride of the Valkyries

It's used in the scene in which the helicopters approach the Vietnamese village prior to machinegunning and destroying it. I found the scene itself electrifying, but the aftermath made it turn sour in my stomach - as I guess was Coppola's intention.