Aria

An Aria (Italian for "air") is a strophic song, performed as a setpiece of traditional opera, and forms one of the basic building-blocks of traditional opera alongside Recitative, Arioso (between Aria and Recitative), Duet, Trio, Ensemble, Chorus, Dance and March; which would be separated by pauses for the audience to clap.

Although Wagner had admired a great number of "number operas" like Mozart's, Bellini's Norma, Halevy's La Juive and even Meyerbeer's Les Hugeneuts, he had (Beginning in The Flying Dutchman) started to break-down the divisions between them, making them less clear and more seamless, and not allowing the room for the music to be interrupted by clapping. By the time he was beginning to write The Ring he had written about his desire to abolish all of these forms in favour of a style of free declamation and naturalistic stage action.

Nevertheless, the finished Ring (like Wanger's other mature works) does contain Aria-like and even Recitative-like passages, as well as choruses and other musical structures. These are used in part to denote pieces that are concieved of as songs within the diegesis (like the Forging Song) but also to denote the old-fashioned (as Fricka's close-minded reproach to Wotan) or the decadent, as in the chorus scenes that define the music of the Gibichungs.