Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens

By his own account, Ryder was so enthralled by a five-hour performance of Wagner's Götterdämmerung that he rushed home and began painting this rendition of the opera's narrative, working without sleep or food for forty-eight hours. Galloping down a moonlit path, the legendary Norse hero Siegfried encounters a group of Rhine Maidens who beckon seductively from the phosphorescent river. They warn the hero that the magical ring he won by slaying a dragon was forged from stolen gold and bears a deadly curse. Siegfried defiantly proclaims he would rather die than give up his prize. By the opera's dramatic climax, the nymphs' apocalyptic prophecy is fulfilled: Siegfried is killed; overcome by grief, the heroine Brünnhilde sacrifices herself on her lover's funeral pyre, the other gods and heroes of Valhalla are consumed by the spreading conflagration, and the Ring of the Nibelung, now purified by the flames, is returned to the river from whence it came.Wagner's orchestration engulfed listeners with an overwhelming torrent of sound, and Ryder's composition offers a visual counterpart to this rhapsodic aesthetic experience. Although Ryder's technical naiveté and his unorthodox methods have caused the surfaces of his once-luminous paintings to crack and darken over time, the expressive power and emotional intensity of his art endures.