Two-thirds of the way through his new book on Wagner’s four-part Der Ring des Nibelungen, Michael Downes describes the press coverage of the first performance of the complete cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in 1876. ‘Sixty music critics attend the cycle and write hundreds and thousands of words about every aspect of their experience,’ he writes, before concluding, with perhaps a touch of hyperbole: ‘It is the story of the century.’

His title has many more meanings than that, though. The Ring encapsulates so much of its age; it’s an artwork of a scale – in terms of its length and its reach, scope and ambition – that could only really have been conceived and realised in the 19th century. Downes doesn’t hesitate from comparing Wagner to the era’s great novelists – Dickens, Tolstoy and Victor Hugo – as ‘one of the century’s master storytellers’. And throughout the course of his superb book, he reveals himself as no mean storyteller, either.

The publisher’s blurb describes it as ‘a colourful retelling of the history surrounding The Ring and its conception’, which might raise the eyebrows of the more earnest Wagnerian, and Downes’s style is certainly breezy and entertaining. Don’t be fooled, though. This is also a book that takes its subject – and the reader – very seriously. Its aims are ambitious, setting out to provide not just a guide to The Ring and its gestation, composition and eventual realisation but also a comprehensive account of Wagner’s life throughout that nearly 30-year period.

The story is told in a loose narrative, beginning with Wagner’s appointment as Kapellmeister in Dresden in 1846 and the plans he set out to reform the theatres of Saxony: a demonstration of Wagner’s extraordinary vision not just in artistic but in administrative matters, as well as his unfortunate knack for getting on the nerves of politicians – something that would later cause problems in King Ludwig II’s Munich. We trace the roots of Wagner’s earlier works and follow him, through the revolutionary upheaval that swept through Germany, to his subsequent exile in Switzerland, where, having already sown the seeds for his grand epic, he began to thrash out exactly how he might effectively go about creating it.

Downes weaves in clear-headed accounts of the political ideas that informed Wagner’s planned artistic revolution and offers a superbly readable overview of the sources he would draw on for The Ring. Even more pertinently, he describes how Wagner, with an unerring dramatic sense, deviated from those sources: how he managed to draw them together and synthesise them into a drama uniting both mythic grandeur and human scale. This is no work of hagiography (Downes doesn’t shy away from the major flaws in Wagner’s character and political views) but, every step of the way, he emphasises Wagner’s almost superhuman achievement, the sheer unlikeliness of a work planned on such a scale ever reaching completion or making it on to a stage – let alone on to the stage of a theatre conceived and designed specifically for that purpose.

When it comes to the music, Downes eschews a blow-by-blow account of the scores, instead peppering his story of the composition of each work with insights that take us right to the heart of Wagner’s achievement. He is refreshingly relaxed and non-dogmatic when it comes to discussing leitmotifs, a strategy that keeps his descriptions readable. And the story takes on the compelling quality of a novel when we get on to the quest to get The Ring staged, the perilous process of raising funds and the against-all-the-odds achievement of the initial 1876 Bayreuth Festival. Nor does his story stop there: he gives a potted history of the The Ring’s subsequent fortunes, paying special attention to its living existence as a piece of theatre, right up until his own personal experiences of Stefan Herheim’s recent Deutsche Oper Berlin staging.

I can’t say I share Downes’s assessment of that production, nor am I a fan, necessarily, of his use of the historic present for his main narrative – with multiple necessary diversions from the main thread, the result can be a little disorientating. But those are insignificant niggles when it comes to assessing his overall achievement. ‘The last word on The Ring will never be written,’ Downes writes in his Prologue. ‘I hope, however, that [this book] will be welcomed by some readers and opera-goers as a first word.’ It can be safely recommended as so much more than that: indeed, for my money, this is now the best introduction to The Ring out there.