Der Ring des Nibelungen, Aug. 1986

The first event, affecting all four operas, took place six months before. In December of 1985, I received a call from Armin Jordan telling me that he could not return to Seattle to conduct. He had severe back problems, and he couldn’t make the flight. If he came by boat and train, he still wouldn’t have been able to conduct. So only six months before the cycle began, I had no conductor. In September of that year, we had presented a new production of Massenet’s Manon, a first for Carol Vaness in the title role. The octogenarian, Manuel Rosenthal, once music director of Seattle Symphony, returned for the first time since 1950 to lead the work. While he was here, he told me that he had always wanted to conduct the Ring, but “no one would ever ask me to do it.” Confronted the disaster of Jordan’s cancellation, and knowing that Rosenthal was both a composer and a brilliant conductor, I called him in Paris. He was eating dinner. I asked him to conduct our Ring that summer, and there was a pause. He said, “Wait a minute.” A few seconds later he came on again and said, “Yes. I will do it.” Again my own inexperience allowed me to make such a choice. Rosenthal had conducted Walküre, maybe only Act I, in concert. In December I was asking him to learn the entire cycle by June, when rehearsals were to begin. For a musician of any age, such a request was simply ridiculous. To prepare the cycle takes at least a year of thinking, and a lot of preparation. And Rosenthal was in his early 80s. Yet when the conductor came to Seattle that June, he was totally prepared, not only prepared but with a personal interpretation of the Ring that was remarkable. He conducted two great cycles, memorable as much for their orchestral quality as for what happened onstage. I am happy to say that at the time of this writing, February 2003, Maestro Rosenthal is 98 years old, still in good health, and living in Paris. [Editor's note: Maestro Rosenthal passed away on June 5, 2003, less than two weeks short of his 99th birthday.]

DAS RHEINGOLD, August 1986

In this first cycle of the Rochaix-Israel Ring, Das Rheingold was a notable success. The first night it was greeted with enthusiastic applause, an event which happened in all ten repetitions of the work at Seattle Opera. The opening performance had one of the most terrifying events in my 19 years at the Opera. In the opening scene, the stage was covered by a blue, opaque, and shiny material. It covered props for later scenes, which, because they were covered, suggested rocky elevations in a river bed. It was slick to walk on, and the idea was that the Rhine Daughters could easily run on it while Alberich slipped, stumbled, and fell wherever he moved. At the end of the scene, after he had taken the gold, the scene went dark, and the blue material was flown into the flies, revealing the second scene on which Wotan and Fricka were asleep. The time it took to fly the material was roughly the time of the interlude. It should have moved out of sight at about the time the trombones and tubas state the Valhalla theme, and the second scene is about to begin.

On this first night, it rose beautifully. About six feet off the stage, it stopped. It was caught on a corner of the large piece of scenery which stood some 25 feet high and from which the gods eventually would start toward Valhalla. It stuck and continued to stick despite gentle and not-so-gentle tugs. The music played. Israel, Rochaix and I, sitting in different parts of the house, all froze in our seats. There was literally nothing we could do. The music played on. Maestro Rosenthal of course knew what had happened but kept playing. He had decided, he afterwards told me, that he would stop the orchestra just before Fricka was supposed to sing. Just at the moment the Valhalla motif was sounding, I saw a shadow go up the ladder on the large piece of scenery. The shadow disappeared at the top, but suddenly the blue material started to move. True, Fricka and Wotan began the scene with the blue still visible, but it was clearing fast. The man responsible for this heroic act lay flat on the top of the piece of scenery throughout the 45 minutes of scene two, only descending after the set piece was moved offstage for the Nibelheim scene. He was the prop master, Peter Olds, and I told him that night—and meant it—that as long as I am general director of Seattle Opera he has a job. He still is Prop master and a superb one at that.

DIE WALKÜRE, August 1986

The shock of this performance was its acceptance by the audience. No one booed. All the clamor of the year before had vanished. Even the Ring audience, classically silent when the orchestra is playing, applauded the flying horses, and everyone seemed now, if not to understand, at least to accept Wotan’s attic. The changes in the production were important: Bambi was gone; the floral area where Siegmund and Sieglinde found love had a lot more flowers and plants and really looked springlike. The tower in Act II, a bona fide copy of the kind of tower used in the nineteenth century to raise and lower singers onstage, now had a new painting on its stage front that suggested more the mountainous terrain where the act is set. In Wotan’s attic, since we knew exactly what Brünnhilde’s sarcophagus in which she sleeps in Siegfried would be, she lay on a structure which suggested the sarcophagus’s being built. The flames were more imposing. More than a few people had complained bitterly that despite the fact that we used real flame at the end—something no company did at the time—there was not enough of it, nor was it scary. Linda Kelm, Brünnhilde, and Johanna Meier, the Sieglinde, sang wonderfully as did Roloff. A newcomer to the cast, Warren Ellsworth as Siegmund made quite an impression. I also remember Maestro Rosenthal’s saying in rehearsal at the beginning of Act III just before the Valkyries flew on, “Now, we go to the circus.”

SIEGFRIED, August 1986

A never-to-be forgotten night, a night when I really wondered if this Ring would ever work. It began in Act I, very conventional in look and superbly sung by Ed Sooter, our Siegfried, and Hubert Delamboye, the Mime (on his way to take on a major career in heldentenor roles in Europe). Before the performance, in an insanely stupid moment, I had told the critic of the New York Times that we had a fool-proof anvil. Traditionally, the splitting of the anvil by Siegfried at the end of the act is a big problem. Either it doesn’t split because he hits the wrong place on the anvil with his sword, or it opens too early. Long before the crucial moment on this occasion, when he was sharpening the sword, the anvil obviously opened. Sooter held it together until he could make a pass at it with the sword, but the nature of raising the sword and swinging it made it open long before he hit it. In that act, we introduced the first of four small bears that the different Siegfrieds over the 11 years of this Ring would lead out of the forest. Each was very popular with the audience, but as the years went on, more and more animal activists wildly protested the use of the bear. All my reports on the condition of our bears, born in captivity, never mistreated, and acclimated to Wagner’s music so that it would not be a shock in performance, never stopped the complaints.

This season I had believed in my innocence that we could prepare three Ring operas and give them their premiere all at once. The Wagner Festival in Bayreuth does this (in fact it presents all four new the first time), but a century of experience, a total concentration on a new Ring and months of rehearsals allows this to happen. In our case, we were not staffed to accomplish the feat. When we were planning this Ring, I had said to Rochaix and Israel that I wanted the dragon really to frighten the audience (an absurd idea in the age of Hollywood and the post-Walt Disney era). I thought that if the dragon were larger than the opera house and that we saw only its claws, it might really be frightening. They agreed, and Israel designed huge claws that would come at Siegfried. We never really had the rehearsal time necessary to make the claws work properly, and on opening night they were risible. The audience did laugh, and almost immediately afterwards they were dubbed “crab legs.” What was assumed by us but lost to the audience was that if Fafner were wounded at all, he would die. Nothung, Siegfried’s sword, need not go into his heart. This bit of fairy-tale subtlety didn’t read.

And at the end of the opera, there was joy and play by Siegfried and Brünnhilde. They literally seemed to be ready to make love and hid under a huge available canvas. This was much too much for many Wagnerians who see the two as dramatic figures, incapable of such innocent play.

The production was thunderously booed. Many again applauded, but the boos were huge. I was worried.

GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG, August 1986

The audience, somewhat angry at Siegfried, came to Götterdämmerung with a chip on their collective shoulders, or, at least, that’s how I saw them. I was delighted when the whole mood changed. They adored the first two acts. The black columns suggesting the hall of the Gibichungs were properly ominous; the use of Brünnhilde’s sarcophagus, which they had seen the night before, delighted them. And they were properly appreciative of the amazing work of the crew in quietly and efficiently changing all the scenes in full view.

Act III began well. Rochaix had an idea that the Rhine Daughters would carry the river with them. Each had a long swath of the same material that we had seen at the beginning of Das Rheingold, and they would enact, as they sang, a kind of choreography with the material. They would at times drape the long pieces into a kind of Rhine. Siegfried would jump the created “river.” They would also surround themselves with the cloth when appropriate so that they looked like prophetesses. It was very effective, and the audience loved it.

Then came the final scene. I have since learned that any Ring audience will forgive you much if you present them with a great final scene. If not, they feel cheated. We had a theoretically good idea which simply didn’t work. In Die Walküre we had given them real fire to surround Brünnhilde; in Siegfried when Siegfried goes through the wall of flame, we had used the conventional flame made out of lights. Now at the end, we had the idea of suggesting flame and then water by means of fabric. During the first part of the Immolation Scene, chorus members and non-singing actors made a great pyre of Ring props. Brünnhilde, at the crucial moment, threw an artificial torch on the pyre. Movement artists then rushed out wrapping her and the pyre in red cloth as though it were burning, à la artist Christo. Again, lack of rehearsal killed us. If this could have worked, and I’m not sure about that, it would have taken two or three whole rehearsal days to make it right. We gave up on doing the water with a blue wrap when the Rhine overflowed and simply reintroduced from the flies the huge blue “Rhine” from Das Rheingold. That worked, but the red material looked like red strips of cloth being run around a soprano by movement artists as she stood in the midst of a pile of props. No matter how marvelously Ms. Kelm sang the Immolation, the audience hated what happened afterwards. They manifested their displeasure by copious booing, and a lot of cheering for the singers. In one great moment someone threw flowers and someone else some tomatoes at Rochaix. He always has said that he missed his big chance. He should have bitten into a tomato and smelled the flowers.

In the letters afterwards, there were many pouring out invective, violent diatribes, largely against me as the person behind what the writers considered an outrage. One of the major charges, often repeated, was one I treasured: “You forced us,” they said, “to pay attention to the stage. We couldn’t sit back, close our eyes, and dream to the music.” Imagine what Wagner, the composer of all composers who believed in his words and his message would have said to that! But there were many positive letters and reviews that acknowledged that we had created something totally new to America and that, with all its faults, this Ring was an important moment in American opera. I was scared about the future, but those supportive letters meant more to me than I can ever say. I answered all 300 of them, about 150 of each variety.