The troubles of Fricka and Wotan, part 3: Golden apples or no, these gods sure have grown older (preliminary version)

Christa Ludwig as Fricka and James Morris as
Wotan in Das Rheingold, at the Met in 1994

Remember these bits, which we heard back in the first installment of our expanded listen to mezzo Yvonne Minton?

FRICKA: (1) Dearest sister, sweetest delight,
are you restored to me?
(2) See how our pure one stands humiliated and ashamed:
her anguished look mutely pleads for release.
Wicked man, to ask this of a loved one!

-- from Scene 4 (the final scene) of Das Rheingold

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Dec. 8-11, 1980


Irene Dalis (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. Live performance, Dec. 16, 1961


Mignon Dunn (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sixten Ehrling, cond. Live performance, Feb. 15, 1975


Christa Ludwig (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, James Levine, cond. DG, recorded Apr.-May 1988
[To clarify: While we later heard singers besides Ms. Minton sing these bits (in longer clips), this is our first hearing of Dalis, Dunn, and Ludwig in this music.]

by Ken

O course by the end of Das Rheingold Wotan, at the cost of forking over both the Tarnhelm and the Ring, has earned back his sister-in-law, Freia, from the custody of the Giants Fasolt and Fafner, which presumably means that the gods will once again have free access to the golden apples, the golden apples that grow in Freia's garden, which have heretofore kept them perpetually young. And so, once again, they should in theory no longer be aging.

Except that, with the passage of time and the accumulation of life experience, they clearly do age in at least some ways.

Now hear this:

FRICKA [pausing with dignity before WOTAN]:
Here in the mountains where you hide
to escape your wife's view,
here in solitude I seek you out,
that you may promise me help.
WOTAN: What troubles Fricka,
let her announce freely.
FRICKA: I have learned of Hunding's distress;
he called on me for vengeance:
the guardian of wedlock heard him,
promised severely to punish the deed
of the shameless impious pair
who so boldly wronged the husband.

-- Fricka's next appearance, in Act II of Die Walküre

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Theo Adam (bs-b), Wotan; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Aug. 22-29, 1981

Irene Dalis (ms), Fricka; Otto Edelmann (bs-b), Wotan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. Live performance, Dec. 23, 1961

Mignon Dunn (ms), Fricka; Donald McIntyre (bs-b), Wotan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sixten Ehrling, cond. Live performance, Mar. 1, 1975

Christa Ludwig (ms), Fricka; James Morris (bs-b), Wotan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, James Levine, cond. DG, recorded April 1987

Wow, that is one giant leap, for mankind and womankind and every other kind of kind. Though our second Rheingold bit above isn't quite the last thing we hear from Fricka in Das Rheingold, it's close. And the Walküre bit is definitely the first thing we hear from her following the long gap between the operas. In a bit we're going to be more precise about the contexts of all of our bits, which means going back over a stretch of interchange we already heard last week, this time breaking it down a bit, as we ponder the obvious question --


HOW THE HECK DID WE (AND OF COURSE
THEY) GET FROM POINT A TO POINT B?

Most of this is ready to go (at least I think it's most of it; these things rarely work out so easily, though), but for now I have to ask you to check back.

#

The troubles of Fricka and Wotan, part 2: He's always out making a big deal -- big deal!

from Scene 2 of Das Rheingold

FRICKA: A splendid dwelling, beautifully appointed,
might tempt you to tarry here and rest.
But you in building an abode
thought only of defenses and battlements.

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Dec. 8-11, 1980

Mignon Dunn (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sixten Ehrling, cond. Live performance, Feb. 15, 1975

from Scene 4 of Das Rheingold

WOTAN [turning solemnly to FRICKA]:
Follow me, wife:
in Valhalla dwell with me.

Friedrich Schorr (b), Wotan; Berlin State Opera Orchestra, Leo Blech, cond. EMI, recorded June 17, 1927

Ferdinand Frantz (bs-b), Wotan; Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Rudolf Moralt, cond. Broadcast performance, 1948

by Ken

In the "The troubles of Fricka and Wotan, part 1: A tease for this week's post, spotlighting those troubles" (a follow-up to last week's "Yes, we're going to do a bit more Rheingold business, but first we have to solve a Mystery Baritone conundrum"), we heard a bunch of performances of the above snatches from the second and fourth of the four scenes of Das Rheingold, the first two installments in what I think of as a triptych of "Scenes from a Marriage" embedded in Wagner's Ring cycle: the Fricka-Wotan confrontations that reach their blow-out climax in Act II of Die Walküre.

I really tried to present both Fricka and Wotan at their human best, even if, in one of the two cases, that "best" exists mostly in the character's own head. As I mentioned in the "tease," I also tried hard to keep those moments just that, moments, but I promised that we would hear fuller, more contextual versions, and we will. First, however --

SHOULDN'T WE BACKTRACK TO ESTABLISH MORE
CLEARLY HOW WE GOT TO THIS POINT IN SCENE 2?

The troubles of Fricka and Wotan, part 1: A tease for this week's post, spotlighting those troubles

from Scene 2 of Das Rheingold:

FRICKA: A splendid dwelling, beautifully appointed,
might tempt you to tarry here and rest.
But you in building an abode
thought only of defenses and battlements.

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Dec. 8-11, 1980

Irene Dalis (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. Live performance, Dec. 16, 1961

Mignon Dunn (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sixten Ehrling, cond. Live performance, Feb. 15, 1975

Regina Resnik (ms), Fricka; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Rudolf Kempe, cond. Live performance, July 26, 1961

from Scene 4 of Das Rheingold

WOTAN [turning solemnly to FRICKA]:
Follow me, wife:
in Valhalla dwell with me.

Friedrich Schorr (b), Wotan; Berlin State Opera Orchestra, Leo Blech, cond. EMI, recorded June 17, 1927

Rudolf Bockelmann (bs-b), Wotan; Berlin State Opera Orchestra, Franz Alfred Schmidt, cond. Telefunken, recorded Feb. 10, 1933

Ferdinand Frantz (bs-b), Wotan; Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Rudolf Moralt, cond. Broadcast performance, 1948

George London (bs-b), Wotan; Vienna Philharmonic, George Solti, cond. Decca, recorded September 1958

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b), Wotan; Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded December 1967

by Ken

Really, I had enough audio files ready, and a sketchy but sufficiently conscious sense of where they were going to lead us, that I should have been able to put up at least some sort of tease for this week's post bright and early this morning. And yet I didn't. Instead I blew off my schedule for the day and instead spent it playing and weighing, making still more clips and contemplating different paths through them. For once I've kind of had fun doing it. That counts for something.

Even now I can't say for sure where exactly we're going to wind up, not to mention exactly how we're going to get there. Even once I decided on something like the above array of musical excerpts, they've undergone considerable mutation, mostly (perhaps not surprisingly) in the direction of expansion. But in the end I fought the temptation to let the basic clips grow. Though we'll hear longer versions of them, for now I want to limit them to just interestingly diverse iterations of these two very small but very powerful moments.

I'm pretty sure there's going to be a significant-size "main" post yet to come this week, and possibly in more than one installment. For now, however, I'm going with this. Enjoy these morsels.

#

Yes, we're going to do a bit more Rheingold business, but first we have to solve a Mystery Baritone conundrum

Our watchword for the day: Remember the Crams!

Showbiz greats Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker catch their breath during the recording of the cast album of the Styne-Comden-Green musical Do Re Mi -- on Jan. 8, 1961, say my sources, though it's often listed as "1960." (The show opened on Dec. 26, 1960.) Of course, what I'm calling "my sources" is actually the first Web page I found which gave an actual date, so who knows? I just now found a site that says: "First LP release: December 30, 1960." Hmm, that'd make for mighty tight scheduling if the recording didn't happen till Jan. 8.)

From the OBC recording session we're going to have a special little "Sunday Classics Do Re Mi suite," whose connection to our subject will, I hope, be clear. The suite will include this song that we heard Sunday:

STYNE-COMDEN-GREEN: Do Re Mi: "Take a job" (The Crams)

Nancy Walker and Phil Silvers (Kay and Hubie Cram), vocals; OBC recording, Lehman Engel, cond. RCA, recorded Jan. 8, 1961

by Ken

As noted in the post title, in this, the "actual" post for this week, we are going to transact a bit more Das Rheingold business, continuing from Sunday's "tease" post, but maybe not so much as I was thinking when I posted that tease.

I might say that thanks to the stratagem of the tease post, and to your kind indulgence, once I had the tease posted I was able to salvage one out of the two movies I had tickets for today in the Museum of the Moving Image's current "Curators' Choice 2018" series, and better still, it was a humdinger: Paul Dano's first film as director, Wildlife, adapted from the Richard Ford novel by him and his partner, Zoe Kazan, who were both on hand for a post-screening discussion along with two actors from the terrific cast.

As I mentioned we're going to hear a little "suite" of Do Re Mi excerpts, which I think is relevant to our area of food-service inquiry. In addition, though, while I was at my clip-making, I did a couple of additional Do Re Mi numbers, written for a legit baritone. One of these numbers is quite famous; Wikipedia lists 23 performers who have also recorded it.

Act I, "I know about love" (John Henry Wheeler)

Act II, "Make someone happy" (John Henry Wheeler)

Mystery baritone (John Henry Wheeler), vocals; OBC recording, Lehman Engel, cond. RCA, recorded Jan. 8, 1961


SO WHO IS OUR HAPPY-MAKING MYSTERY BARITONE?

A tease for this week's actual post, in which we hear more from Yvonne Minton (plus maybe, uh, some other stuff)

Yvonne Minton as the Rheingold Fricka in a production by . . . no, no, I can't try to pretend that this is one of those don't-mean-no-goddamn-thing modern-style misstagings. Actually, I did find a shot of YM as the Walküre Fricka -- a kind of funny-looking one, at that -- but I thought I'd best save that for the "real" post. No apologies for depicting her as the title character of Der Rosenkavalier, though -- as we heard in last week's post spotlighting "Four variously special singers," she was a radiant Octavian.

Now, speaking of the two Frickas --

"It's very difficult to do very much with Rheingold. One just looks dignified, and you just really do what the text dictates because [Fricka] never has more than two lines at a time. There are one or two really beautiful phrases, but they are very short."

-- Yvonne Minton, in a 1981 interview with Bruce Duffie, asked how
different the roles of Fricka in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre are

And I'd guess these are among those "really beautiful phrases" --

Dearest sister, sweetest delight,
are you restored to me?

See how our pure one stands humiliated and ashamed:
her anguished look mutely pleads for release.
Wicked man, to ask this of a loved one!

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Dec. 8-11, 1980

by Ken

Yes, I know, you don't want to hear this week's litany of woes -- you know, all the difficulties and obstructions and whatnot. I think I know how a post of some sort will come together, and the two Frickas will be at the heart of it. So enjoy this hint, and this other maybe-sort-of-hint.

JULE STYNE with BETTY COMDEN and ADOLPH GREEN:
Do Re Mi: "Take a job"


Nancy Walker (Kay) and Phil Silvers (Hubie), vocals; Original Broadway Cast recording, Lehman Engel, cond. RCA, recorded 1961


NOT SERIOUS ENOUGH FOR YOU? OKIE-DOKE --