Der Ring des Nibelungen, Aug. 1995

Monetary success is my first recollection of this last revival of the Rochaix-Israel Ring. I announced in the summer of 1993 that we couldn’t produce the Ring without raising one million dollars by September of 1994. Seattle Opera had begun the process of retiring a large deficit, and we could do nothing to make it worse (we retired it completely by 1996, and of this writing have been deficit-free since). Though we didn’t quite get to a million on the date specified, we raised more than $1.5 million by the time the Ring cycles finished. It was wonderfully satisfying, too, to see that this Ring, in which everyone connected with Seattle Opera believed so fervently, finally scored a grand slam with the audience. We were sold out before we opened for all three cycles, breaking box office records for the Ring in Seattle. Audiences were ecstatic; I thought the vocal and musical quality was high, and the whole experience was one to savor.

Hermann Michael conducted his third set of cycles with even more understanding, a kind of quiet authority that grew throughout his tenure as Ring maestro. For the first time we had two Brünnhildes: Marilyn Zschau took on Walküre and Götterdämmerung, and Nadine Secunde sang the Siegfried Brünnhilde, as well as her signature part, Sieglinde. It was not something I would like to repeat; I think one Brünnhilde is ideal. But in this instance it worked well. Zschau, a tireless and emotionally involved singer and great actress, made Götterdämmerung unforgettable, and Secunde, superb in her first essay of Brünnhilde, gave us also a brilliant performance of her world-famous Sieglinde.

My most vivid memory involves Siegfried. No character in opera is harder to cast. Even though the role is well written for the heldentenor voice, there are always very few heroic tenors, and even fewer who will attempt to sing the role. Siegfried is not only the longest role in the Ring, it is almost surely the longest role in opera. During the course of the opera’s four hours or so of music, he is onstage singing or listening for at least three-fourths of the time. I had chosen a Siegfried who had sung many Wagner roles in Germany, a strong-voiced spinto tenor, not a natural heldentenor. He looked the role, and I had been tremendously impressed with his audition and his work onstage in other roles. When he came to Seattle, he began brilliantly. As the premiere approached, the stress of the role, the unremitting wear on anyone’s vocal cords who is not born to sing Siegfried, began to show. I have always believed that I went into denial in the last week; at the dress rehearsal he was clearly ill and not able to sing the part. No one ever worked harder, but it wasn’t going to happen. Siegfried was scheduled to open in seven days, and I had no tenor. Three sold out Rings, people coming from all over the world, and one of the three principal characters not present.

Where was the cover? Shortly before the rehearsals began, the tenor who had agreed to cover had decided that he didn’t want to do it and had withdrawn. With only two weeks to go before the first rehearsal, and with the pressures inherent in launching this immense project weighing on me, I first tried all the logical tenors, came up with nothing and decided to go without protection—a situation I have desperately tried to avoid since.

I will never forget that night. I’ve had other nights somewhat like it (see 2001), but nothing quite as bad. One of the managers of Columbia Artists, Alan Green, saved my life that night. I knew the names of the four or five tenors who could sing Siegfried successfully. One of them was Wolfgang Fassler, and Green managed him. Green was in Seattle to attend the Ring dress rehearsals, and he knew where Fassler was in Germany. As I remember, he was either singing or planning to sing a Fidelio in Bregenz, Austria. Green had his number, and I reached Fassler by phone. He said he wanted to talk to the people in Bregenz, and he would think about it. It was then about 3:00 a.m. in Seattle. I lay on my bed, waiting for the phone to ring. At 5:00 a.m., he called and said he would do it and would arrive in Seattle not that day but the afternoon of the next day. He would get to the theater in time to see the second and third acts of Götterdämmerung. When Fassler arrived, he sat next to me. His English was minimal, but he was clearly very excited about the production and the quality of the singers.

Rochaix, incredibly frustrated by the situation, at first just wanted the assistants to do the work with Fassler; he didn’t want to try to invent a characterization with a new person after having worked for three months with someone else. When he saw how quickly Fassler worked and how eager he was, he immediately changed his mind. What happened, so far as I am concerned, was a miracle. Fassler worked every day until 7:00 p.m. the day before the Siegfried. Everyone in both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung—don’t forget that the longest role in opera is followed in a Ring two days later by a Wagner-length role which in some ways is less easy to sing—worked with him although many were performing the first two operas of the cycle. I will never forget that first night. Fassler was triumphant. He performed both operas with virtually no errors in staging, disclosed what a friend of mine called an indefatigable tenor, and was beloved by the audience. The sad postscript to his success here was his death in an auto accident in Germany two years later.

The other big news in this cycle was our new Fafner. Not the singer, the dragon. In December of 1994, Michael M. Scott, a man who gave the money to Seattle Opera from 1986 through 1991 that helped keep the opera company afloat, told me that he would fund a new dragon. He had not liked our second dragon, the one that first appeared in 1987. Robert Israel and our technical department, listening closely to Scott’s ideas, created a dragon that worked marvelously in this Ring. I can honestly say that we have never created any prop (if one can call something so big a prop) that was as popular. The idea in this particular Ring, set in the 19th century, was to have a dragon with a locomotive for a body and a huge scoop shovel for a mouth. Above the mouth were eyes and out of its mouth could belch a huge flame, smoke or nitrogen, the latter forming what appeared to be the poisonous drool described by Wagner. Inside the shovel mouth, it had huge steel teeth. It moved electronically, with several crew members on both sides. The Fafner (Gabor Andrasy) seemingly ran the machine, as he ran around a platform on the locomotive. It poured out flame twice; after the second spout of flame, Siegfried leapt up on the machine and stabbed the Fafner. When he was stabbed, the machine ceased to emit smoke, and the crew members “leading” it all fell to the stage, seemingly dead. At its appearance in all three cycles, it drew great applause. After the Rings concluded, it was exhibited in Seattle at the Pacific Science Center.

It was overall the most successful run of this production of the Ring. The Walküre horses performed for their fifth time successfully. All of Alberich’s transformations in Das Rheingold happened smoothly, and the flaming Immolation was again successful. Much more important, the acting drawn by Rochaix from the singers was moving and impressive. The audience seemed to love every minute of the Ring and applauded each opera with massive enthusiasm.