There were a few famous 19th-century musicians who were seemingly in competition for the title of "most long-winded composer." When it comes to orchestral music, for example, it's a tossup between Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner, who both wrote single symphonies lasting well over an hour.
With opera, though, there's one composer who has the field all to himself: Richard Wagner. His operas Die Meistersinger and Parsifal are both among the longest of all time. But those two are pipsqueaks when compared to his epic, The Ring of the Nibelungen -- a cycle lasting some 15 hours in all.
It's true that Wagner's Ring is actually four dramas, not just one. But together, they tell a single, continuous story -- in a form Wagner called "music drama." That one story takes four, full evenings to perform.
Still, the individual works of the Ring do stand quite nicely on their own, and the opening drama, Das Rheingold, is actually one of the most concise operas Wagner ever composed. At a little less than two and a half hours, it's easily the shortest drama in the cycle -- and it can seem even shorter than it really is.
Das Rheingold is a 140-minute spectacle that flies by in a flash, introducing vivid new worlds where gods, giants and dwarves all vie for ultimate power. But while the story is surely compelling, the whole thing does take place in just one act -- with no intermissions. So, if you plan on listening to it all in one go, you might think about packing a lunch.
On World of Opera, host Lisa Simeone presents the drama straight from the source -- in a production from Wagner's own theater, and the 2016 Bayreuth Festival, in Germany. The stars are baritone Iian as the god Wotan, and bass-baritone Albert Dohmen as the Nibelung Alberich, whose vengeful anger sets the entire story of the Ring in motion, in a production led by conductor Marek Janowski.