Donald McIntyre, a bass-baritone who played a starring role in a provocative, influential new way of presenting the epic operas of Richard Wagner, died on Nov. 13 in Munich. He was 91.
Mr. McIntyre’s death was announced by the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, which Wagner founded in 1876 to present his own works. The festival, where Mr. McIntyre sang from 1967 to 1988, called him “one of the most important Wagner baritones of our time” and “the heart of our festival.”
The booming voice of Mr. McIntyre, a giant of a man who once seemed destined for a rugby career in his native New Zealand, rang out for more than five decades in the world’s major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, where he had 16 major roles from 1975 to 1996.
But “the highlight of my career,” as he put it in his 2019 autobiography, was his performance at Bayreuth as Wotan, the king of the gods, in “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre” and “Siegfried” in a groundbreaking 1976 production of Wagner’s four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” directed by Patrice Chéreau.
By presenting the operas, based on Germanic mythology, as a neo-Marxist allegory of capitalist exploitation in the 19th century, Mr. Chéreau’s production — the so-called centenary “Ring,” marking the 100th anniversary of the tetralogy’s premiere at Bayreuth — shattered norms and set the stage for decades of updatings of canonical operas.
Audiences around the world were used to seeing Wagner gods and heroes holding spears and wearing pseudo-Norse winged helmets. While some postwar Bayreuth productions had emptied out the stage for radically spare visions of the classic works, putting Mr. McIntyre’s Wotan in an Edwardian frock coat and dressing the Rhinemaidens as cancan girls caused a near riot at the tradition-encrusted summer festival.
As Mr. McIntyre recalled in his memoir, an enraged older lady beat another spectator over the head with an umbrella; “howls of fury” greeted his entrance onstage in the frock coat; and the composer’s daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner, a onetime confidant of Hitler’s, told Mr. McIntyre that if she came across Mr. Chéreau, she would “shoot him” for politicizing the “Ring.”
Over four years, however, with the production revived, revised and refined each summer, many holdouts eventually warmed to it, and at the final performances, in 1980, there was a 45-minute standing ovation. When Winifred Wagner and Mr. Chéreau finally met, she admitted that “many times I wanted to kill you,” but added, “After all, isn’t it better to be furious than bored?”
Mr. McIntyre, though, had immediately understood that Mr. Chéreau — along with the production’s conductor, Pierre Boulez — was forcing audiences to see and hear Wagner afresh.
“Chéreau introduced a completely new style of acting, almost like cinematic acting, with intricate instructions and a hundred details to remember,” Mr. McIntyre said in his memoir, “The Only Way Is Up,” written with the conductor and writer David Rees.
Banished, Mr. McIntyre wrote, was “the old, static approach to Wagner.”
The result is evident in the filmed version of their “Ring,” later broadcast around the world. Mr. McIntyre’s commanding yet fluid presence introduces a new kind of drama to Wotan’s character, without overstatement. The movements are taut and spare: “For every gesture a singer made,” Mr. McIntyre wrote, “Chéreau demanded an urgent motivation.”
The New York Times critic John Rockwell described Mr. McIntyre’s performance in the film as “warm, noble and dramatically involved,” surprising since he “so often sounds woolly and weak in live performance.”
By then, Mr. McIntyre had already had considerable experience in Wagner, including Wotan and the Wanderer in the previous Bayreuth “Ring” production, directed by Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s grandson.
“Singing the triple role of Wotan/Wanderer in the ‘Ring,’” Mr. McIntyre wrote, “is like running a marathon: You must be fit or it will kill you.”
It was this propensity for big, physically demanding parts, harking back to his athletic beginnings, that defined Mr. McIntyre’s career, to general approbation from critics.
In Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Met in 1981, he was “a solidly satisfying Kurwenal,” Donal Henahan wrote in The Times. Singing Hans Sachs in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” there in 1993, he was “touchingly human,” the Times critic Edward Rothstein wrote, with “a subtle weariness.”
Donald Conroy McIntyre was born in Auckland on Oct. 22, 1934, the youngest of three children of George McIntyre and Hermyn (Conroy) McIntyre. His father was a World War I veteran who lost his arm in the Battle of Gallipoli. His mother was a semiprofessional violinist who gave young Donald his first music lessons.
He attended Mount Albert Grammar School in Auckland, where he was the top player on the school rugby team, won the heavyweight boxing championship and was recruited by the national rugby team.
He already had his heart set on music, however, and began his career singing with the Auckland Choral Society, the Auckland Symphony Orchestra and the N.Z.B.C. National Orchestra (now the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra). He left for England at 23 to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, but was soon receiving so many singing engagements that the school kicked him out.
His performance in Verdi’s “Nabucco” with the Welsh National Opera in 1959 attracted the attention of the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company (later English National Opera) in London, which he joined in 1960 and where he sang for seven years. He made his debut at the Royal Opera in 1967 in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.”
He is survived by his wife, Bettina (Jablonski) McIntyre, and three daughters from an earlier marriage to Jill Redington: Ruth Hutton, Lynn McIntyre and Jenny Jackson-Clark.
Mr. McIntyre was knighted in 1992. He continued to sing into his 70s, retiring in 2008 after having heart trouble. But he said that nothing ever equaled the drama, onstage and off, of Mr. Chéreau’s “Ring.”
“Looking back on my career,” he wrote, “having supported a worthy cause that seemed insupportable to everyone else is one of the deeds I am most proud of.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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