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.

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