About this edition
Das Rheingold is the "Vorabend" — the Preliminary Evening — that opens Richard Wagner's monumental tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. Unfolding in a single unbroken act of four scenes, it begins with one of the most audacious openings in all of music: a 136-bar pedal point on E-flat major that swells from silence into the surging waters of the Rhine itself. Here Wagner first deploys the leitmotif technique that would define the entire cycle, and calls for the specially conceived Wagner tubas and a battery of eighteen tuned anvils to conjure the subterranean forges of Nibelheim, making this score both a musical and an orchestrational landmark.
This edition reproduces the full orchestral score published by B. Schott's Söhne in Mainz, plate number 20800, issued without a printed date but attributable to circa 1873. Schott served as Wagner's principal publisher for the Ring, and this full score appeared several years before the first complete cycle performance at the inaugural Bayreuth Festival in 1876, making it one of the earliest printed full scores of Rheingold to reach conductors, scholars, and orchestras. As a Schott house edition prepared during Wagner's lifetime, it stands as a foundational primary source for the study and performance of this score.
- Format: full orchestral score
- Page size: 8.5 x 11 inches
- Reproduced from a public domain historical source
- Published by Purple 4R Publishing
Because this historical Schott edition now resides in the public domain, we're glad to bring it back into print in a clean, readable format — making Wagner's groundbreaking score freely and affordably available to conductors, orchestral musicians, students, and scholars alike.