And from this blizzard of references, the omission of at least three puzzles me. The first is Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World, which deals with the cultural penetration of Tristan und Isolde and its mythical derivations, and was certainly influential among artists and intellectuals in the years following its publication (1940, rev. ed. 1956). Considering its centrality, Tristan gets short shrift from Ross, relative to his attentions to the Ring and Parsifal. The second is Richard Barber’s The Holy Grail, the most comprehensive recent survey of all the Arthurian sources for Parsifal. I was relieved when Ross finally got around to locating Wagner’s Grail Castle in the Pyrenees, Provence to its North and Spain to its South. For several chapters I was afraid we were winding up in Rutland Boughton/Percy Grainger-English Country Gardens territory, and not the old Kingdom of Aragon and the gardens of the Villa Rufolo—Parsifal is not on the English side of these legends. The third is Paul Robinson’s Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters, which insightfully confronts the intertwining issues of opera, singing, and gender from a gay perspective, with which Ross is also concerned. I’m led to wonder about the rationale for inclusion and exclusion.

Fricka knows? I am highly susceptible to Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. I was born in Lincoln, Neb., and my earliest childhood memories, back to the stage of formless impressions and images, are from the small towns of Nebraska and Northern Colorado, and their prairie environs, that Cather so eloquently describes, along with their restraining pace and the sense of longing and distance they hold for an artistic dreamer. Moreover, my father was a singer as well as a teacher of American literature; for a year or so, he even ventured to Chicago to study voice with a prominent teacher and heard his first world-class opera there, just as Cather’s heroine, Thea Kronborg, does. So it’s not from any lack of empathy that I stumble over Ross’s attentions to the Fricka/Wotan scene in Act 2 of Die Walküre. And it is not that I don’t think he’s on the right track in defending Fricka’s character, her arguments, and Wagner’s setting of the scene, and in identifying the scene’s outcome as a crucial hinge of the cycle’s plot.

But I have been confused about Ross’s take on the scene’s end since he first discussed it in one of his New Yorker articles where, in an uncharacteristically unclear sentence, he almost appears to believe that Wotan’s “Nimm . . . den . . Eid!” is a command to Brünnhilde (“Take the oath!”) rather than the bitter, fateful capitulation to Fricka “[Then] take . . . [my] . . oath!” Ross then gives a nice description of the orchestral bars that accompany Fricka striding upstage to her chariot, where she encounters Brünnhilde for a moment and prepares her for Wotan’s bad news. (If the score’s stage directions have been followed, Brünnhilde, seeing that her father and his wife are still in a deep and probably unpleasant conversation, has gone to shelter her horse and is just now returning, having seen and deduced nothing.) Cather’s Thea figures into Ross’s interpretation of the scene’s events. In the final chapter of The Song of the Lark, when Thea has become a leading Wagnerian soprano, she describes her characterization of Fricka as a beautiful woman resembling Thea’s mother, with her calm domestic wisdom, concluding with “Fricka knows!“—emphasis thus, but spoken quietly.