The Ring cycle is an exceptional challenge at any opera house. In Bayreuth it is part of day-to-day business, but Castorf and Denic's Ring was a particularly attractive task due to its sheer size, four different sets, all on one turntable, and a high degree of realism and equipment.

The first task was to reduce the turntable to the later diameter of 20.5m in order to avoid collisions between the superstructure and the outer walls of the Festspielhaus. This also made it necessary to reduce all decoration parts in their footprint by about 5%. The highs were largely retained.

Then there was the question of how to design four completely independent operas, how to transport and store them, and how to deal with them during daily assembly and disassembly if the decorative elements, some of which are up to 15m high and largely walkable, are to stand on a turntable.

The Festspielhaus does not have a permanently installed turntable, but it has a pitch of approx. 2.5%. The kink at the transition from the outside area to the stage, over which every piece of decoration has to be driven, has already cost the lives of many roles, especially Turtles due to their design-related weak point in the slewing ring.

Since a complete assembly of the decoration did not seem practicable in repertoire operations due to the size and complexity, large units should remain assembled and proceed... as is customary in Bayreuth. But then there was the problem of how to get these units on a turntable, which would always be attached and applied at least 20cm high. There are no machine trains in the area behind the turntable, only a fire protection gate.

The design of the rooms had very elaborately formed floors, with landscape, industrial halls with oil puddles and lots of rubble, tiles, rails and grass... considering the construction times, treating these separately did not make sense.

A heavy-duty tilting turtle was developed for the Lohengrin 2011, which is not only capable of safely moving up to 1.5 tons and turning smoothly, but which also has no problems with the transition to the open air area and driving over manhole covers, rain gutters and other obstacles has.

With a bit of fine adjustment and in consultation with the stage designer, I developed a division concept where stage wagons were dimensioned in a recurring grid for the respective decoration. The necessary divisions matched the look of the superstructure. These cars with decoration were equipped with the tilting turtle, they were assembled in the core, and then the shape of the turntable was supplemented with filling cars. It was important to build as few "unnecessary" additional parts as possible and to make them as recyclable as possible.

Of course, the drive must be located on the outside of the turntable. So the disk was encircled by a ring of ring segments containing a profile for the friction wheel drive, and powered by the motors at the back of the stage.

Due to the fixed assembly on the base wagon with a certain standing area and ballasting, for example, decorative parts such as the motel sign (14.5m high and very top-heavy) were easy to master. However, some other elements were too large and placed in such a way that they could not remain on the basic car elements. Therefore, the towers of the Valkyrie, which also had to be replaced during the performance, were built individually as a unit and assembled with point hoists.

The 15m high "NYC-Stock Exchange" of Götterdämmerung could also remain partly together, the storage space for it was available on the backstage of the Festspielhaus. If she actually had to be moved out of the house once, she was put down a second time because the backstage gate is only approx. 6.3m high.

There was an analysis of the storage area logistics in connection with the other not exactly small stage sets by Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Holländer. All of the units assembled into a turntable on stage were also their own transport carts, containing the lavish equipment with all the details, eliminating the need for laborious setup of all the small pieces of equipment.