Eight Days of Luke takes us into the world of the Nordic gods, as both sides in the intensely amoral struggle prepare for Götterdämmerung.
According to Albert Speer, the Berlin Philharmonic's last performance before their evacuation from Berlin at the end of World War II was of Brünnhilde's Immolation Scene at the end of the opera.
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Bearing Brünnhilde's shield and mounting her horse Grane, Siegfried rides away as an orchestral interlude (Siegfried's Journey to the Rhine) starts.
writing just before the outbreak of World War II - Tolkien was also rather disturbed by Norse mythology: he saw that the ethos it represented could be used by either side, as indeed it was in the deliberate cultivation of Götterdämmerung by the Nazi leadership a few years later.
There he sang in 1887 in the premiere of Viktor Nessler's opera Der Trompeter von Säkkingen, and on 25 January 1888 he played the role of Gunther in the American premiere of Wagner's Götterdämmerung.
In 1899 (i.e. one year after Bismarck's death), Wilhelm Kreis created a fundamental tower design, known as Götterdämmerung ("Twilight of the Gods") for a competition by the German Student Union in the shape of a massive pillar of fire.
John Culshaw, the Decca recording producer, was disappointed with the performances of the first three operas in the tetralogy, but was impressed by the Götterdämmerung and edited up a version of it but Decca did not release it.
The musical and theatrical influences of the opera can be felt in, amongst others, Liszt's monumental Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam" for organ which is based on the Anabaptists' chorale, the duet between mother and lost child in Giuseppe Verdi's Il trovatore, and the catastrophic finale of Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung.
Other performance credits include appearances at the Liceu (Isolde), Teatro Regio di Torino (Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung), the San Francisco Opera (Brünnhilde in Die Walküre), Vienna State Opera (Isolde, Kostelnička), Deutsche Oper am Rhein, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, and the Canadian Opera Company.
de Rico's story was a simplified, truncated version of the full play cycle, which took several creative liberties, the most noticeable of which was the use of the three Norns as narrators throughout the story, rather than merely for Götterdämmerung, as in the original.