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. Audiences were ecstatic I thought the vocal and musical quality was high, and the whole experience was one to savor. We were sold out before we opened for all three cycles, breaking box office records for the Ring in Seattle. 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.
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. 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). I announced in the summer of 1993 that we couldn’t produce the Ring without raising one million dollars by September of 1994. Monetary success is my first recollection of this last revival of the Rochaix-Israel Ring. The Ronco “Fafner-Matic” in Wagner’s Siegfried, 1995
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