The boy from East Texas who never learned fear

My bicentenary pilgrimage to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to see Wagner's complete Ring of the Nibelung was a musical treat. While the production and Robert Lepage's noisy Machine may have fallen a little short, the cycle I attended was extremely good, musically.

The Met orchestra under Fabio Luisi seemed only a blip down from where it was a few years ago under James Levine, who I think is one of the great Wagner conductors of our time, especially when leading this, one of the great Wagner pit bands. Luisi took things a little faster than Levine in several places, which was refreshing, although I've always greatly admired Levine's interpretations of Wagner.

Of course, the Ring requires a huge cast to cover all the gods, giants, Nibelungs and all their offspring. Some noteworthy performances from the cycle I saw in late April and early May:

• Mark Delavan made his Met debut as Wotan this year. He sang powerfully and portrayed magnificently the head god's majesty as well as his very human weaknesses.
• Stephanie Blythe as his wife, Fricka, brings sympathy and emotion to her character, who is too often portrayed simply as a shrew.
• Gerhard Siegel played Mime with just the right balance of making you feel sorry for him and hating his evil intentions.
• Richard Croft as Loge was better than I expected. This is a role that doesn't require a huge Wagnerian voice, and I'm sure it's a fun role to play.
• Hans-Peter König was the only singer to appear in all four of the music dramas (none of the characters appears in all four). His often-sinister bass served him well as Fafner the Giant in Das Rheingold, Hunding in Die Walküre, Fafner the Dragon in Siegfried, and Hagen in Götterdämmerung.
• Simon O'Neill and Martina Serafin made an almost perfect Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walküre.
• The Scottish tenor Iain Paterson has the sound, the good looks and just the right amount of royal arrogance for the feudal lord Gunther in Götterdämmerung.
• Soprano Wendy Bryn Harmer was both sincere and gullible as Gunther's sister, Gutrune. I wonder when we'll get to hear her in a more substantial Wagnerian role, like Sieglinde?

I have become a big fan of Eric Owens as Alberich. This American bass-baritone is a superb singer and actor with a commanding stage presence. He really brings out the pure evil of the character. Alberich appears in three of the four parts of the Ring, and with each one his time onstage gets shorter. I heard that Owens once complained (in jest) that he's the title character of the whole shebang -- the Nibelung who forged the Ring -- and yet in Götterdämmerung he appears onstage for all of 10 minutes out of a 5-plus-hour performance!

And then there's Siegfried, the lad who never learns fear. Jay Hunter Morris hails from Paris, Texas, and he's essentially a big ol' redneck with a wonderful, thick, down-home East Texas drawl, who just happens to sing opera. But when you put him on the Met stage, you'd think he was born and raised in the heart of Bavaria. He doesn't have the really big heldentenor voice for which this role was intended, but he knows when to hold back and when to let go, so by the end of a five-hour performance of Siegfried, he's barely lost an ounce of stamina. And you can tell he's having a blast acting his part, which he does very well.

One thing I always listen for in any Götterdämmerung performance is the incredibly treacherous vocal leap that Siegfried has to take in the last act, when he's calling out to the hunting party. It's an octave leap to a high C, and I have heard many very good heldentenors miss it completely -- it is, after all, coming near the end of a very long and demanding role. Morris nailed it (as he did in the HD telecast in 2012), perhaps not as forcefully as you'd want, but he did nail it. And he does it by singing it exactly as Wagner wrote it -- with an eighth-rest right before the high C, which gives the singer just enough time to adjust his voice for that cruelly high note.

At the end of the night, when the cheers come raining down for Morris, he always acknowledges the orchestra, as many singers do, but he also always leans over and extends his hand into the prompter's box at the foot of the stage, shaking hands with another of the many professionals who support the singers and other musicians at the Met. Morris is nothing if not gracious.

The Met presented three Ring cycles this year, and as often happens, the headliners in the major roles sang in two of them, with other singers getting their chance on the stage of the Big House in one of the cycles. For Delavan, Morris and Owens, that meant skipping the third cycle. The marquee Brünnhilde (she's on all the posters and promotional literature) was Deborah Voigt, but she sat out the middle cycle, which is the one I attended.

I've always wanted to see and hear Voigt in a live performance. She was long heralded as the up-and-coming dramatic soprano who would eventually step into this most demanding of roles. I wonder if she just waited too long in her career to do it, or I've heard that her weight-loss surgery of a few years ago affected her voice. But hearing her on the radio and reports from those who've heard her in the house leave little doubt that she isn't really up to the part.

The Brünnhilde in this cycle was Katarina Dalayman, who was superb. Despite a little bit of a shriek in her highest notes, she did a remarkable and very enjoyable job, from her treacherous opening Valkyrie Battle Cry to the closing Immolation scene.

The third act of Siegfried is always tough because Siegfried has been onstage singing for several hours before he awakens Brünnhilde, who's coming in fresh. Dalayman's big sound was a little mismatched with the smaller-voiced Morris, but they pulled off their exhilarating duet convincingly.

And the chorus in Götterdämmerung? Well, it's the Met chorus, which is simply the best. And choral writing was one of Wagner's strong suits -- too bad he didn't do more of it.

NEXT: Das ende