Der Ring des Nibelungen, Aug. 1984

Seattle Opera only produced one Ring in 1984, and it was in German. This was the last year of the first Ring production of Seattle Opera, which had been seen annually since 1975. The 1984 Ring was produced by a team of two, the Norwegian tenor Ragnar Ulfung and Sheila Gruson, his assistant. Many of those who sang that summer, including Roger Roloff as Wotan, Julian Patrick as Alberich, Barry Busse as Siegmund, and Johanna Meier as Sieglinde would return in the first cycle of the new Ring two years later.

This Ring had normally been staged in both English and German in about a month, but the production had been largely a repeat of what had happened before and was a very uncomplicated staging. For some reason, I believed that within the same time period we could actually direct the Ring anew, a feat that is frankly impossible. The planning showed my own lack of experience in producing opera. The time crunch was made worse because Ulfung was involved with his active singing career and couldn’t arrive in Seattle until some days after the rehearsals began. Despite these problems and the fact that Ulfung’s ideas differed markedly from those of his assistant, everyone pulled together very well, and Ute Vinzing, the Brünnhilde, sang brilliantly. The one recollection most vivid to me in the cycle, however, took place on its opening night.

Roloff, a fine bass-baritone and a very self-contained artist, was preparing to sing his first Wotan. I have since learned that it is never a wise idea for anyone singing one of the six major roles in the Ring to sing the role the first time in a Seattle Opera cycle. The pressures of a festival audience, the amount of singing, the close proximity of the performances all work against success. Roloff, in his extremely conscientious fashion, had prepared to the nth degree. He seemed completely calm, very dangerous I now know for anyone debuting any role. In the opening Das Rheingold during Wotan’s first major statement, “Vollendet das ewige Werk,” at the first big F, his voice failed. He simply lost it. I was sitting in a box allotted to the general director (ever since I have sat in the orchestra). I thought at first that I was hearing things. As the first scene with Diane Curry as Fricka continued, I realized that I was hearing only a very light sound from Wotan, less than when a singer saves his or her voice in rehearsal. In my own inexperience, I didn’t know what to do and simply froze in my seat. Nineteen years later I still don’t know what I could have done. There was no cover; there had always been another cast in Seattle to sing a cycle in English. I hadn’t considered the problem, and we didn’t have a back-up. The 150 minutes of that Das Rheingold count among the longest of my life. Roloff gallantly sang on but with only a suggestion of sound, and I remained in my seat.

When it was over, it was quickly determined that from nerves or infection, he was hors de combat. His cords simply weren’t coming together. Somehow I got through the usual reception after this shortest opera of the Ring, constantly visualizing the whole cycle and my nascent career crashing all at the same time. I had one desperate idea, and the next morning, the day of Die Walküre, at 7:00 a.m., I called the great heroic baritone Thomas Stewart in Santa Fe. Somehow I knew where he and his wife, Evelyn Lear, lived, and I think I got his number through information. I asked him if he could come up and sing Wotan in Die Walküre—that night! —and Siegfried two days later. He asked me to wait a minute. I heard sounds of vocalizing, and he came back and said, “Sure, I can leave here by noon.” Henry Holt, the conductor, and I picked him up that afternoon (shortly after getting a speeding ticket on my way to the airport). Tom said he could figure out the staging in 15 minutes and asked only that the traditional cut (used often in repertory performances of the opera but not in Seattle since) in Wotan’s narrative be taken. He sang marvelously that night and at the Siegfried, saving my skin, delighting the audience, and adding luster to the Seattle Opera’s Ring tradition, already nine years old.