In the late 1970s, Seattle Opera produced Wagner’s RING twice each summer, once in German, the next week in Andrew Porter’s English singing translation. KUOW broadcast the English-language performances, so radio listeners could follow the story.

Here’s Noel Tyl in 1976, singing to his Brünnhilde Wotan’s anguished explanation of his despair from Act Three of “Die Walküre.” Tyl varies a bit from the printed translation:

"Then burning with anger against myself, from an anguished weakness rising in frenzy, yearning and raging, I was inspired and driven to a fearful resolve: in the wreck of my ruined world my eternal sadness I’d bury: while you lay lapped in blissful delight, filled with emotion’s rapturous joy; you laughed, while drinking the draught of love, and I tasted the gall, drained bitter sorrow and grief."