It took 15 hours of opera spread over an entire week, but the Universe has at last gone full circle. In the Covent Garden production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, we last saw the gods who ruled the Earth frozen in their pomp at the end of Das Rheingold. In Götterdämmerung, the endgame, they’re back – as gilded statues lowered into the bonfire by an ecstatic mob.

Life, destiny, fate – they’re under new management. The steel helix that has dominated Keith Warner’s staging in so many ways is finally banished. What replaces it, we can tentatively infer, is a more optimistic reboot – a simple sphere, and a girl inside it, staring out into the audience. We’re in charge: what’s our first move?

For all the brickbats that have been hurled in Warner’s direction, his production has forged its own logic. And at its heart is a simple message: when you create gods to do your business for you, you give up your moral responsibilities. And in Götterdämmerung we see the consequences in Kurt Rydl’s rasping Hagen, who has turned the world into a box – a gigantic replica of the magic Tarnhelm that his father, Alberich, created all those hours ago in Das Rheingold to make the world do his loveless bidding. Not for the first time, history is repeating itself.

Regrets? Well, I have a few too many not to mention. That Warner hasn’t managed to tidy up the final conflagration – still a visual and theatrical mess – only shows how overknotted this Ring can be. So many themes, pictures, props and symbols – and yet most only serve to tie up with themselves. If anything, the whole is too literal, rather than too obscure.

There is nothing unclear about the biggest triumph – the power and passion of Antonio Pappano’s conducting. In musical terms, this has been a Ring for our times: not the single-minded vision of an old-school maestro, but a performance born out of the drama and text. In Götterdämmerung, Pappano’s convincing path through Wagner’s giant paragraphs reached its apotheosis in a heartrending funeral march, which unrolled in tear-drenched tenderness before galloping desperately to the opera’s fiery conclusion.

After some shaky vocal performances in Sunday’s Siegfried, this final chapter also featured vastly improved singing. John Treleaven’s Siegfried paces himself well and finds a better focus for his hard-edged tenor, giving real pathos to his death throes. Mihoko Fujimura gives a riveting performance as Waltraute. And although he has his squally moments, Rydl’s Hagen certainly looks and sounds like a man whose father (Peter Sidhom’s deathly Alberich) tells him that he was “bred for hatred”.

Best of all, Lisa Gasteen’s clarion-voiced Brünnhilde has made good where it really counts. This, really, is her story – the redemptive ascent from vengeance to self-sacrifice – and Gasteen gives it her considerable all.

Box office: 020-7304 4000

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010