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Some of the settings are indeed pretty, like the opening tableau of Das Rheingold, in which three nude Rhinemaidens swim in a pool of water, reflected vertically by means of mirrors so that it appears they are frolicking in a deep river. But there are inexplicable departures from the prevailing neoRomantic ethos, born of the director's fascination with stage gadgetry. For the Ride of the Valkyries in Die Walküre, Hall straps four warrior maidens to a slowly descending platform, while beneath them their sisters prepare the naked bodies of dead heroes for consignment to Valhalla. This mothership scene seems to have unaccountably wandered in from a production by, say, George Lucas.
"Doing all four parts of the Ring in a single summer is, of course, quite impossible," says Hall, rightly pointing out the difficulty of mounting four new major productions at one time. But the ability to do the quite impossible is a prerequisite for those who would tackle Wagner. After all, Wagner did it himself.
Hall's increasingly evident failure to produce a coherent view of the Ring rankled the highly critical, proprietary audience as the week progressed. Lusty boos began echoing through the acoustically perfect Festspielhaus (designed to Wagner's specifications) at the conclusion of Die Walküre, reaching their apogee at the end of Götterdammerung. Both Hall and Dudley, who had refused through the week to take curtain calls, were jeered when they finally came onstage—accompanied for protection by Solti, the entire cast and the Bayreuth orchestra.
Some of the singing, too, came in for heavy criticism. Bass-Baritone Siegmund Nimsgern has a rich resonant voice but brought little sense of Wotan's majestic agony to his portrayal. After Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, he canceled his appearance in Siegfried and was replaced by a weak Bent Norup. Poor Manfred Jung, the substitute Siegfried, is physically unprepossessing and vocally inadequate to this most heroic of heldentenor roles, which demands both strength and stamina. Although he gave it a game effort, especially in Götterdammerung, Jung put one in mind of Scholar-Critic Ernest Newman's acidulous remark that too often Siegfried gives "the impression of a man whose mental development was arrested at the age of twelve and has been in custody ever since."
Still, there were a few bright spots amid the prevailing gloom. Tenor Siegfried Jerusalem (Siegmund) and American Soprano Jeannine Altmeyer (Sieglinde) made a hot-blooded pair of incestuous lovers in Die Walküre, and Baritone Hermann Becht's Alberich was powerfully sung. Hildegard Behrens unleashed her blazing, radiant soprano as Brünnhilde, the fallen Valkyrie whose ultimate sacrifice defeats Alberich's evil and purifies the world for the coming new order of man.