As a wind instrument player and a string instrument player respectively, solo horn player Poul-Erik Vilsbæk and concertmaster Lars Bjørnkjær of the Royal Danish Orchestra adopt two different approaches to performing Der Ring des Nibelungen, but what they share is the gratifying experience of being a part of a grand totality.

How does a musician prepare for an undertaking such as The Ring?

Lars: To me the project has been something special, not least because I’m preoccupied with the realm of late Romanticism in general, such as Richard Strauss, Mahler, and Bruckner. The Ring was something I really looked forward to, not least because of the grand-scale epic. As concertmaster, I’m responsible for the musical arrangement – the strokes – that we note down in the libretto beforehand to save time. In fact, we use the old arrangement from the last time the Royal Danish Theatre performed The Ring almost a century ago, and which I modify to suit our needs. Wagner’s music is often quite a challenge for the string section and demands extreme precision. This is why it’s so important with group rehearsals where string instrument players work in instrument specific groups to address the individual challenges they are up against.

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Poul-Erik: I’ve enjoyed the great experience of playing The Ring in Bayreuth in 1976, so I know how daunting the task is for horn players especially. It’s essential that we as an instrument group prepare ourselves as best we can. We invited one of the top specialists in the field, solo horn player Gerd Seifert from the Berlin Philharmonic, to come to Copenhagen and work with us over two sessions. He has played The Ring for 30 years in Bayreuth and he is part of a living tradition that goes back to the day and age of Wagner. He knows precisely where the shoe pinches and how to solve the many problems we face with such an enormous and physically challenging undertaking. The Ring is a very high profile task for a horn player group, e.g. four of the eight horn players play a Wagner tuba – an instrument Wagner commissioned especially for The Ring to achieve a very unique tone.

How important is it for you as musicians in the orchestra to know Wagner’s leitmotifs and how they work?

Lars: Well, you can, in fact, easily play the entire Ring without knowing a single leitmotif and its meaning, but a great experience awaits you if you show a little interest in this aspect. It no doubt makes performing even more interesting if you know that you are playing the spear motif or Fafner’s motif. Michael Schønwandt and Kasper Bech Holten have both throughout the process gone to great lengths to relate the whole universe, personage and leitmotif to the orchestra and that has meant a lot to us. It’s clearly very satisfying to know what it is you are a part of.

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How do you manage to get through an evening where you have to play for 5-6 hours, which is equivalent to playing La Bohème or Tosca twice?

Lars: I’ve come to realise that I shouldn’t do too much during the day [prior to performance] in order to be on my marks around 6 pm. And the fantastic thing is that you – especially when things go well – often lose your sense of time when playing Wagner’s operas. There’s always something ingenious going on in the score. We have quite long breaks in The Ring, and that isn’t a regular thing for the strings. In Verdi’s operas we generally play all the time from opening until curtain fall, but in The Ring there’s sometimes even time to meditate and simply enjoy the totality you’re a part of.

Poul-Erik: You need to know what the score demands of you, and from the very moment you undertake preparations you need to make sure that you have the means with which to meet these demands. But otherwise it is, as Lars says, a question of how you absorb yourself in the totality. In Bayreuth the orchestra performs in complete isolation from the audience and singers. Back then I felt very restricted by the fact that I as a musician had no contact with the singers on stage at all but only played through the conductor. It’s a great advantage that we now have an opera house with an open orchestra’s pit, which can hold an orchestra of the size needed for a Wagner opera. It’s wonderful to follow the interaction between e.g. Stig Andersen and Bengt-Ola Morgnys in the first act of Siegfried and really feel that it’s all interconnected – and that what we do in the pit is also what is happening on stage.

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Der Ring des Nibelunges on CD and DVD
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