Neither Ross nor I knows exactly what Thea means by this—it might go no further than that calm domestic wisdom of her mother’s—but Ross connects it to Brünnhilde’s “Alles, alles, alles weiss ich” (“All , all, all I know,” going on to say, “All is clear to me now”) in the Immolation Scene at the end of the cycle, as if Fricka had wordlessly passed something along to Brūnnhilde back in that Walküre moment. Of course Brünnhilde means in part only that she understands now what has happened. But the “Alles” clearly implies a vision that goes deeper than that, and, perhaps only coincidentally but I suspect not, her words are set deep in the range, in Erda territory, and with Erda coloration.^(I) And with respect to this deeper vision, I think Fricka is passed over. She knows what she knows, which is the set of godly laws and her place of guardianship within them, and through her ironclad interpretation of them she clinches her case with what she has every reason to believe is finality. But all the characters and events of the Ring take place within a pre-existing order of things, an order without beginning or end, of which we know only that it is. This order is feminine, because it is from woman that all things are born. So it is Erda, goddess of the earth, who knows all that can be known. (The male contribution is well represented by the warrior siblings that Wotan has sired upon Erda, and the human race of the Wälsungs he has brought into being in like manner.) When, in the utmost desperation in Act 3 of Siegfried, Wotan summons Erda to ask how he can arrest the rolling wheel he has himself set in motion, she counsels him to consult Brünnhilde, the wish-maiden born of their union. And at the end, Brünnhilde knows, instinctually,  exactly what must be done to restore the order of things to their primal state. Fricka knows nothing of any of that.

Gay Wagner: One of Ross’s earliest essays for The New Yorker was a review of Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat, a smart, highly personal delineation of the phenomenon of the gay opera queen and his passions. I think after all these years that I have read it in its entirety, but piecemeal. I’m drawn into it for a time, and then grow weary. I’ve never finished James McCourt’s Mawrdew Czgowchuz (rhymes with Korjus, and do even informed young gays now get the reference?) either, and barely persuaded myself to stick it out for the second act of Terrence McNally’s Lisbon Traviata, for the same reason: initially attracted by the urbanity and surface brilliance of the writing, and recognizing a kindred-spirit element in the obsessive love  of opera and campy insider jokiness that only such love could engender, I find that the chatty, parodic repartee and the sense of speaking in code for initiates, begins to pall, just as it does in the presence of such company in life. Ross’s review of The Queen’s Throat, though, has an energy, an unguardedness, that I don’t find in his more recent writing, even when he’s advocating for one of his adopted artists. His exhilaration over the book’s very existence, over the opening-up of the closet for all to peer into and to “claim opera as an institution of gay culture” gives excitement to his writing. And even though Koestenbaum pays relatively little attention to Wagner, and that none too friendly (“I do not appreciate Wagner’s endless quest for masculinity.”), the seeds of Wagnerism are already present in Ross’s piece, and the chafing of the topic apparent. Ross makes unqualified assertions he is more careful of now (e. g., that “Wagner hated women,” or that Klingsor is “the final refinement of Wagner’s malformed Jewish type”), but we know where he stands and how he feels.