If you go down to the woods today

Nevermind double decaff lattes, the Space Needle and anti-capitalist riots, this August Seattle will be remembered for something quite different - a big-budget back-to-nature Ring cycle. US audiences are in for a treat, writes Adrian Mourby

This August Frasier and Niles Crane will definitely be at the opera. The big event of Seattle's artistic calendar occurs on 5 August when the Space Needle City unveils its third complete Ring cycle.

"The Ring," says Speight Jenkins, the general director of Seattle Opera, "is what we are known for." The company gave its first cycle in 1975 when the former Los Angeles stage director, Glynn Ross, produced an anti-Wieland, back-to-basics style of Ring using a cut version of the text and a reduced orchestra. So popular was this traditionalist cycle that it was given annually right up until 1983 when Jenkins took over the running of the company.

Jenkins, a former journalist, was determined on giving the home of Microsoft and grunge its first full-length tetralogy and brought in François Rochaix to direct what turned out to be a Brechtian Ring cycle in which Wotan was clearly Wagner, dressed up as ringmaster, while the Valkyries rode around on carousel horses.

"The people of Seattle are terminally polite," says Jenkins with a laugh. "They don't honk their horns like in other US cities and they certainly don't boo, but that night the whole house exploded into boos and cheers – just as if you had been at the Met." Jenkins kept his nerve and soon vegetables were only being thrown during Götterdämmerung. By 1987, the Rochaix Ring was gaining rapidly in popularity – and cost.

"It was getting just too expensive to do every summer," says Jenkins. "So we put it off until 1991 and settled on a policy of mounting a Ring every four years."

By 1995, as Jenkins puts it, the Seattle Ring had become "mythic" in the States, with all three cycles sold out. Nevertheless, Jenkins had his sights on doing something different for the new millennium.

"When a Ring gets successful it's time to move on. So far as I'm concerned, from 1990 onwards there's been no pattern, world-wide. No one knows what to do. So I wrote to four directors and I said that for the first 75 years we did the Ring the way Richard Wagner did it. Then for the next 25 years we did it in the Grecian way that Wieland Wagner pioneered. And since then we've modernised it and done it the Chéreau way but what's next? I've seen all sorts of Rings... a Japanese Ring, an outer-space Ring... but what I haven't seen is a Ring that emphasises nature. And this is something very appropriate to the American North-west, so I asked these four how they would respond to the idea of nature and Stephen Wadsworth gave the most interesting answer."

Wadsworth trained as an actor but knew Jenkins from the days when they'd both been journalists in New York. Wadsworth also wrote the opera A Quiet Place with Leonard Bernstein, but admits that his musical background was much closer to Mozart, Handel and Puccini than Richard Wagner. "Ours was a household of Butterfly and Trovatore. My parents were wary of Wagner and I've seen a lot of Wagner staging that was spectacularly pretentious, a lot that was without heart.

"But some years after Wieland died I saw his Parsifal at Bayreuth in its last season. It was perhaps the most thrilling theatrical experience I had ever had in an opera house – it was a bold, invasive, often upsetting work, radical through the direction of people and their scenes rather than through any post-modern collaging of periods or images."

The Das Rhinegold and Die Walküre of Wadsworth's new Ring were tried out last summer and audiences took to its pre-historical setting and its extraordinarily convincing scenery. "Speight asked for it to be green," says Wadsworth. "And that made sense to me and to my designers. We kept asking for more. More trees, a real horse, cliffs, fire and gradually we all realised we could actually achieve it. I remember the technical director saying on one occasion we can do things now on stage that just couldn't be done even 10 years ago."

"That was the turning point," says Jenkins. "Wagner always said he'd never do it again the way it happened at Bayreuth in 1876, but today we have scenery that looks real – our rocks look like rocks, our cliffs look like real cliffs. No one who's seen them has failed to come away aghast. You wait till you see our dragon."

Jenkins is proud of the fact that Seattle already boasts a "damn fine" rainbow to lead the gods into Valhalla and will be putting a pretty impressive immolation scene together for the end of Götterdämmerung. The Wadsworth production team includes not only three designers, but also the special effects supremo Charles T Buck who is credited as fire designer and flight technical director. "Special effects are part of the Ring," says Jenkins. "I don't understand why Europeans ignore them."

However, Seattle isn't just relying on pyrotechnics to thrill its audiences. For Wadsworth, human relationships are the primary focus of this Ring. "Personenregie is so undervalued in opera at the moment," he says, and Jenkins agrees.

"The audience only really buys into a story if there are people up there. Of course all directors agree with this in theory," he laughs. "But then some of them do things that no one understands. I can think of Ring cycles when I haven't had the foggiest idea of what's going on. When an audience sits there trying to decipher the director's concept. I don't think that's what opera is about. I have been called "an incredible reactionary" but I don't think I am. I believe what you have to do is get singers to act in a way that is responsive to their own lives."

So is this a return to the powerful simplicity of Wieland's Bayreuth? Jenkins disagrees. "No, this is real acting. Wieland created great drama with very little movement, all very intense, but Stephen directs as though it is a play. Our Fricka [Stephanie Blythe] and Wotan [Philip Joll] are not just gods acting like two married people. They are real people who have been married for hundreds of years. I think Stephen gives them dignity by stressing the love in that relationship."

The casting of this North American Ring has been unusual in pitching together a trio of British soloists. Wadsworth is enthusiastic about Jane Eaglen as Brünnhilde, Alan Woodrow, making his Seattle debut, as Siegfried and Philip Joll, making his, as Wotan. "Speight understood that I must collaborate in casting. Directors who only work in the theatre find it incomprehensible that opera directors don't necessarily have any say in casting. But with Speight, because we know each other well and speak often, we really do collaborate – and it is fun – but we both had to feel right about the performer for the offer to go out."

While there's no doubt that the vision contained in this new Ring is Wadsworth's the energy behind it is that of Jenkins, who has made Seattle the Bayreuth of North America. "He cares about the audience," says Wadsworth. "Speight has old-fashioned tastes in some respects but he is a forward-thinking person – open, well-read, a brilliant speed-of-light mind – and he is the most hands-on producer in American opera, and as a Wagner producer he might just be unmatched. His input is constant and never intrusive, and, boy, does he know the material."

Seattle's new 'Ring' premieres on 5 August. There will be three full cycles given under the conductor Franz Vote. For further information call 00 1 206 389 7676 or visit www.seattleopera.org