“Der Ring des Nibelungen” or “The Ring of the Nibelung” in English, is opera at its most colossal: a four-evening cycle spanning fifteen to sixteen hours, written entirely by Richard Wagner himself over twenty-six years. Drawing on Norse myth and the medieval Nibelungenlied, it traces a world's rise and ruin through a cursed ring of power, sung over an orchestra of nearly a hundred players and stitched together by some two hundred leitmotifs. Wagner even built his own theater at Bayreuth to hous