Two down, two little four-hour instalments to go — and it’s already clear that the Royal Opera’s Ring cycle is going to be a substantial musical achievement, a far more cogent spectacle than many feared, and a massive demonstration of the theatrical lift-off that can happen when a big company throws its heart and soul into an epic project.

John Tomlinson’s Wotan remains the epitome of that spirit. Here are touches of Lear, Falstaff and Shaw’s Captain Shotover rolled into one mesmerising portrait of a waning despot desperately trying to hold his world together.

I had toes, fingers and all other available digits crossed as Tomlinson hauled his venerable tubes up the steep slopes of Act III’s draining monologue. No need for worry, though: the veteran bass-baritone invests so much energising nuance into each phrase, and relishes the consonants to such magisterial effect, that any tonal infelicities seem insignificant. His parting from Lisa Gasteen’s exhaustingly tomboyish Brünnhilde, with whom he has joshed and japed so larkily before, is heartbreaking.

But that level of commitment is evident everywhere, not least in the pit where the Royal Opera orchestra plays beautifully for Antonio Pappano. Seasoned Wagnerites will doubtless pronounce that Pappano’s reading lacks Solti’s gusto, Haitink’s gravitas or Reggie Goodall’s grandeur. Yet in Walküre particularly — which has so much ardent, meltingly lyrical love music — Pappano’s flexible, rhapsodic approach, light textures and singer-friendly phrasings are a constant delight.

And Keith Warner’s staging now seems better attuned to the music, less a bombastic distraction. Of course it is still enshrined within Stefanos Lazaridis’s strenuously meaningful spirals and stairways, now twisted, charred and tilted into something resembling a bomb site. But it helps that some scenes have clearly been rethought: the frenetic gathering of the Valkyries, for instance — though that still looks as if a fire alarm has gone off at a coven of muddy witches. Only Loge’s entrance and the flame-grill ending remain disappointingly banal.

There are terrific individual performances. Eva-Maria Westbroek’s vibrant, youthful Sieglinde is outstanding: her voice lusciously listenable from top to bottom; her characterisation of a traumatised woman experiencing true love for the first time utterly entrancing; her final joyous outburst thrilling.

Simon O’Neill is almost as good as a beefy, bedraggled Siegmund, especially when he adds a spoonful of honey to his turbo-charged tenor. On Thursday an ailing Stephen Milling was forced to mime the thuggish Hunding, while the stalwart Clive Bayley sang (very well) from the wings. But Rosalind Plowright gives the most complete performance of her life as Fricka, a buttoned-up Victorian matriarch capable of reducing Wotan to quaking obeisance, yet nevertheless disclosing a mountain of inner anguish.

Only Gasteen, I felt, didn’t quite hit top form, with some thinnish tone up top. But for Brünnhilde, Die Walküre is just a warm-up. Her life gets considerably more complicated with the arrival of Siegfried tomorrow afternoon.

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