Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelung” which is better known as the Ring cycle is a set of four music drama’s (Wagner’s description). It took him 21 years to finish it after he wrote the first draft of the poem. He also took a period 12 years off between writing the 2nd and 3rd acts of the the third of the music dramas. At the end of the cycle there are only two major characters who don’t die. A German judge also once wrote that there was only one character that did not commit a crime.

(The Great Courses – The Music of Richard Wagner)