Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle consists of four operas.
Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cycle of four music dramas: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. Wagner wrote both the librettos and the music, building the large-scale story from Germanic and Norse mythological sources.
Das Rheingold serves as a preliminary evening, while the other three works are often called the trilogy proper. The cycle follows the power of the Rhine gold, the cursed ring, the gods, heroes, and the destructive consequences of greed and domination.
The first complete cycle was performed at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in August 1876. Because Das Rheingold is sometimes described as a “prelude” rather than counted as one of the main dramas, people occasionally answer three. In performance history and standard classification, however, the Ring Cycle contains four operas.