You may think what you like about Richard Wagner, but it remains undisputed that his work had an enormous influence on other artists and still does today. In the picture book "The Ring of the Nibelung", illustrator Martin Stark embarks on a journey of discovery through the Wagner universe and opens up the work to the viewer in an unusual way. The charming combination of illustrative and typographic design and the successful linking of form and content once again demonstrates what a great narrative format the picture book is and creates a completely new viewing and reading experience. We spoke to illustrator Martin Stark about this unusual project.
How did you approach the subject, were you already familiar with the ring beforehand?
Apart from "Tannhäuser", which I had once studied during my school days, I only really knew Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" from the movie "Apocalypse Now", so I found it very exciting and a good opportunity to get to grips with the entire "Ring des Nibelungen" when I was offered the chance to illustrate it. Before I listened to the Ring in its entirety, I initially only studied the text and slowly got to grips with the content. First came the Wikipedia summary, then the plot in chronological order, retold like a fairy tale in a book by Rolf Stemmle, which was very helpful for my understanding when I finally dared to tackle Wagner's libretti. I only went to see a performance of the Ring of the Century after the end of the project so as not to be too influenced by the staging of the illustrations.
How did you approach the implementation and how did you prioritize? That's an enormous amount of material for relatively little space.
For inspiration, I had an exhibition catalog about the historical picture sheet, which was the mass medium of its time from the 16th to the 19th century. The sheets, which dealt with murders and other crimes, were structured in such a way that the course of events unfolded in several scenes on a format-filling background, whereby the sequence of scenes was not necessarily to be viewed from top left to bottom right, but was spread across the sheet in different arrangements and could only be deciphered with the help of a short text at the edge of the sheet. I wanted to transfer this concept to the Ring and summarize the key scenes of each of the four evenings on one sheet in front of a single backdrop-like background. I wanted to make the characters as simple and unpretentious as possible, as a contrast to the bombastic music and so that they are always easy to recognize and follow in the abundance of scenes. In addition to the black and white illustrations, the color gold was added as a further stylistic device, which, used sparingly, usually only highlights the Nibelung gold, the ring and the fire. Silvio Mohr-Schaaff, the Büchergilde's press spokesman and initiator of this project, then came up with the glorious idea of linking the individual scenes with the Norns' thread of fate, which runs through all the arcs until it breaks at the beginning of Rheingold, which was also very fitting in terms of content. You literally have a red or golden thread to follow here.
How much influence did you have on the final realization and form of the picture sheet?
We designed the sheets as a team, with Silvio Mohr-Schaaff, a Wagner expert, working out the family tree for the bonus sheet and always able to give me valuable tips, and Cosima Schneider, the production manager at Büchergilde, taking care of the typographic design of the back pages. The illustrations are on the front pages and only the names of the characters are scattered around the edge for their first appearance, while the back pages contain a short, snappy synopsis written by Lukas Gedziorowski and the complete libretto for the evening in question. The font size of the libretto is of course very small, but is primarily intended to emphasize the sheer amount of text that is sung on a single evening. The design is also reminiscent of old records, where the lyrics were printed in small print on the inner sleeve.
The journalistic format of the Bilderbogen is quite unusual. What attracted you to it, or what were you able to do and live out here that you couldn't do otherwise?
The picture sheet consists of one or more folded printed sheets in a slipcase and offers illustrators a uniquely large format that can be freely designed to depict a story in a new way and to do so in a completely different way to conventional book illustration. The fact that I had five sheets and three different sized formats at my disposal, with the largest for "Twilight of the Gods" being an entire printed sheet, meant that I could fold and design each sheet differently, sometimes in portrait or landscape format and sometimes the sheet has to be rotated so that you can follow the action. It is structured in such a way that it is revealed piece by piece with each unfolding, until at the end you have the entire content of an evening spread out in front of you, like on a large poster.
What I also really like here is the contrast between the illustrative front and the typographic back and that the viewer has to interact with the sheets differently than with a book, by unfolding, turning and flipping them, jumping back and forth between the images at the front and texts at the back and folding the individual sheets into a large whole, connecting them with each other through the norn thread.
What I also found very exciting was how Wagner interwove parts of the Norse saga world and the Nibelung saga with his own elements to create a new, sprawling epic, which not only broke completely new ground in terms of composition by giving each character their own theme, among other things, and which continues to exist to this day, especially in the film soundtrack, but also in terms of content, as with the crossover stories in comics that are common today. I hope that the picture book can serve as an easy introduction to the Nibelungen Ring, as well as a visual reminder of its content, as another new facet in the plethora of publications on the subject.
