He remained with the company as a leading baritone for 10 years, where he was often seen in productions starring Beverly Sills,[2] performing for example as Raimondo in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor which was broadcast nationwide.

Other roles in the revival of the then-neglected belcanto repertoire[6] were Enrico in Donizetti's Anna Bolena, and Bellini's Giorgio in I puritani, and Oroveso in Norma.

[2] As a guest, he performed the role of Claudius in Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas at the San Diego Opera in 1978, and the four villains in Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1980.

Hale shifted towards heavier bass-baritone repertoire and appeared in the title role of Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer first at the Opernhaus Wuppertal in Germany in 1978.

[2] Hale appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, again first as the Holländer, alongside Janis Martin as Senta and conducted by James Levine.

[7] It was his 100th performance in the role, as reviewer John Rockwell from the New York Times mentioned, who compared the evening to the premiere with a different cast.

But Mr. Hale knows how to declaim a Wagnerian phrase, and his big moments - "Die Frist ist um", "Wie aus der Ferne" and his final self-revelation - made a far greater impact than they had in Mr. Morris's bland account.

[1] He came to regard the company as his artistic home, where he learned "not only to sing his great operatic roles, but also to shape them in terms of words and acting".

[2][7] A reviewer noted then: Here was an artist whose voice, good face, noble bearing and telling gestures expressed the promptings of a deep imagination, an artist who commanded not just the notes of his part but the spirit, from tragic grandeur to ironic detachment, from flooding tenderness to grim rage, all breaking forth with the immediacy of real life.

[7]Other roles in Berlin included Pizarro in Beethoven's Fidelio, Amonasro in Verdi's Aida, Scarpia in Puccini's Tosca, the Holländer, the four villains in Les contes d'Hoffmann, and Méphistophélès in Gounod's Faust, as a "whimsical antithesis" to Wotan.

He performed the role of Jochanaan in Salome by Richard Strauss when he first sang at the Royal Opera House in London, in 1988,[2] where he worked with Georg Solti.

[2] Hale sang the title role of Bartok's opera Bluebeard's Castle, in a concert performance at Carnegie Hall in May 1999, with Christoph von Dohnányi conducting the Cleveland Philharmonic.

At the Salzburg Festival, he portrayed Pizarro in Fidelio and sang the bass solo in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1990, and returned for Barak in Die Frau ohne Schatten in 1992.

[6][7][24] Hale recorded Handel's Messiah with Sir John Eliot Gardiner on Decca,[7] and both Verdi's Requiem and Schumann's Das Paradies und die Peri for Deutsche Grammophon with Giuseppe Sinopoli.