The final performances of the Rochaix/Israel Ring were extremely successful—all three cycles sold out before opening, breaking box office records, and the company, after retiring a deficit which had accumulated by the early ‘90s, figured out a way to present the Ring without going into debt. Marilyn Zschau and Nadine Secunde split the role of Brünnhilde; Gordon Hawkins joined the ranks of Seattle’s Ring-ers for the first time; and Monte Pederson, who unfortunately succumbed to cancer a few years later, was a fine Wotan. Speight Jenkins had to scramble at the last minute to find a replacement Siegfried when John David De Haan was taken ill; Wolfgang Fassler flew over from Germany—during the final rehearsal of Götterdämmerung!—and saved the day.

After two less-than-successful design concepts, the team hit a home run with the 1995 dragon, one of the greatest Fafners of all time plus the perfect solution for the production’s nineteenth-century industrial age concept. Bass Gabor Andrasy, costumed as he was as Fafner in Das Rheingold and with his voice magnified by his machinery à la Wizard of Oz, drove the Ronco Fafner-matic from a console at the back of the beast while his minions helped maneuver the monster—a mutant child of a locomotive engine and an excavator, with glowing brake light eyes, hissing liquid nitrogen steam, and tenor-scorching firey breath that pleasantly toasted patrons in the first few rows. Then, after being stabbed by Siegfried, Andrasy fell from his console and sang the moving death scene in his own voice, without any technical augmentation.