Richard Wagner and the Gold Beneath the River

What You'll Learn

• Discover what a leitmotif is — a musical theme that represents a character, object, or idea, like a musical name tag that tells you who or what is in the story just by listening
• Learn what an opera is — a play where everyone SINGS instead of talks, with an orchestra telling the story alongside the singers
• Understand the incredible scale of Wagner's Ring cycle — four connected operas that together take about fifteen hours to perform, telling one enormous story from beginning to end
• Explore Norse and Germanic mythology through music — meeting gods, giants, dwarves, dragons, and magical objects that inspired Wagner's greatest work
• Learn how Wagner was so determined to do things HIS way that he actually built his own opera house just to perform the Ring cycle exactly as he imagined it