Richard Wagner built an entire theatre in a small Bavarian town just to stage his four-night epic, The Ring of the Nibelung. He hid the orchestra under a hood so the sound seemed to rise out of nowhere, and he darkened the auditorium, something almost no theatre did. Emperors, kings, Liszt and a young Tchaikovsky came to hear the first night: the Rhine, in E-flat, rising from the deep. The words are imagined.