Herz was the first director to apply Felsenstein's concepts to Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, staged in Leipzig from 1973 to 1976.

[1][3] His first direction work was in 1950 Richard Mohaupt's Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten at the Kleines Haus (small hall) in Dresden.

[4] His sometimes gruff style of work and his lack of concern for the Socialist Unity Party of Germany bureaucrats met with little approval.

[4] Herz was from 1981 to 1991 chief director at the Dresden State Opera, from 1985 in the reopened Semperoper,[1] for whose opening he staged Weber's Der Freischütz.

For the first time, the Leipzig production also applied the principles of realistic music theatre, as developed by Felsenstein, to Wagner's Ring.

[8] Both Herz and the conductor of the tetralogy, Gert Bahner [de], and Rudolf Heinrich, responsible for stage design and costumes, had been Felsenstein students.

In the conceptual preliminary work (July to September 1972)[9]: p.  Herz and Heinrich developed the thematic-staging core points and the visual worlds of their Ring interpretation.

At the end of Götterdämmerung, the ring transformed back into "a gold web, a golden gossamer, dreamlike and wafting like a veil.

Heinrich's pictorial worlds are characterised by a collage technique of historically authenticated details, which he alleviated with fairy-tale and abstract elements.

The castle of the gods Valhalla, for example, was a compilation of the Palais de la Justice in Brussels, the staircase of Vienna's Burgtheater by Gottfried Semper and a glass dome from Turin.

Herz and Heinrich decided that it is the world of Wotan and his adversary Alberich (who is only the alter ego of the father of the gods, as they deduced from the musical analysis of both leitmotifs) that is destroyed here.

Consequently, Herz reinterpreted "Siegfried's Funeral March" as Wotan's abdication: the father of the gods (who actually no longer appears in this opera) strides saluting through a deserted trellis of eagle pylons.