It is unwise to make up your mind about any performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen until the final scene. Wagner’s stage directions indicate that the Rhine Maidens are reunited with the gold, Brünnhilde mounts Siegfried’s funeral pyre and Valhalla is consumed in flames. Everything is destroyed, yet the music is positive.

That gives the producer a lot of freedom. Is it really the end? Does the story of love and greed repeat itself endlessly? Or is there hope?

The most telling productions provide no easy answer but set us thinking. Tim Albery did that in his Scottish Opera Ring; so did Harry Kupfer at Bayreuth in 1988. But when the curtain came down on Götterdämmerung, the last of the four Ring operas, at Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus on Monday, no one knew what to think. Tankred Dorst, the 80-year-old dramatist-turned-stage director, gave us a bit of everything. A boy toyed with a crown, only to cast it aside. A stony evocation of Wotan’s eye made a brief appearance, as it had done in Das Rheingold. A man who had spent the evening reading a book left the stage. And after fleeing the flames the Gibi-chungs trickled back to survey the ruins.

What were we to make of that? My answer has to be: “not much”. If Dorst had reassembled the silent representatives of our time who had made fleeting appearances earlier in his Ring, it might have made sense – as if to say we, as moral beings, have the choice to change the world or leave it as it is. Dorst’s finale did not make that challenge.

Inconsistency dogged the entire evening. The Gibichungs, hotel guests in formal evening attire, looked good – but the bald, brown-shirted Hagen resembled a fascist thug. The Rhinemaidens were a lot sexier than in Rheingold, but the act one finale made nonsense of the text: no sooner had the hooded Siegfried breached Brünnhilde’s magic fire circle than he forced Gunther to sleep with her.

There was no interpretative thread connecting Götterdämmerung to the previous three evenings. At his curtain-call Dorst was roundly booed. Not by me: his production was not provocative enough to deserve a reaction either one way or the other.

The best performances achieve a fusion of sight and sound at Wagner’s climaxes, of which there are a good many. That’s when you should feel the goose-bumps. Dorst’s Ring has been no match for the music, but at least Christian Thielemann and the festival orchestra kept their side of the bargain. A volcanic act one finale underlined what an instinctive Wagnerian Thielemann is. The funeral march was equally powerful, but most revealing of all was the transparency he found in Wagner’s sound.

The diminutive Mihoko Fuji-mura electrified the Waltraute scene, outsinging Linda Watson’s uncharismatic Brünnhilde. Hans-Peter König was the booming Hagen, Stephen Gould a lusty Siegfried. Bayreuth has four more summers to weld their disparate performances into a drama worthy of its unique Wagner tradition.