The Wagner Ring Cycle App

Everything you need to listen to and enjoy Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, a 14-hour cycle of four operas adapted from medieval legends.

Listen! Choose from 13 audio performances of the Ring Cycle. Requires an Apple Music subscription. Krauss 1953, Solti 1958, Karajan 1966, Bohm 1967, Swarowsky 1968, Boulez 1980, Janowski 1980, Levine 1987, Haitink1 988, Neuhold 1993, Weigle 2010, Thielemann 2011, and Luisi 2026.

Read! Bilingual German-English libretto is precisely in sync with the music, line by line. Powered by the Wagner Ring Dataset. Reformatted into poetic lines with indentation showing the metrical lift structure.

Understand! Margaret Armour's 1910 English translation preserves the alliterative verse and archaic feel. Perfectly aligned with the German at the line level.

Leitmotifs! 100 leitmotifs are labeled throughout. Sword, Ring, Curse, Spear, Giants, they're all here! Understand how these musical structures underpin the drama itself.

See a complete piano reduction score by Richard Kleinmichel, digitized by the Wagner Ring Dataset. See exactly which measure is playing, in sync with the music.

Single-screen intuitive UI is focused on the libretto and offers an opera outline, leitmotif browser, Wikipedia articles, search, and more.

Other features:

Listen to Deryck Cooke's 1968 analysis of how the motifs evolve and grow out of each other, right in the app.

Arthur Rackham's 64 illustrations from 1911-12, inline with the text as they appeared in Margaret Armour's published translation.

Full-text search of either language of the libretto.

Links to synopses, character lists, and historical and musical background, readable without leaving the app.

Scene 1 of Das Rheingold available for free with all features available. One-time in-app purchases unlock each full opera or all four.