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It's as homely as a country prayer meeting: might be any lonely woman getting ready to die. It's full of the thing every plain creature finds out for himself, but that never gets written down. It's unconscious memory, maybe; inherited memory, like folk-music. I call it personality." Fred laughed, and turning to the piano began coaxing the FRICKA music again. "Call it anything you like, my boy.
Wagner did not find it possible to get this continuity when he came to set to music the arguments amongst Wotan, Fricka and Freia: there are short cantilenas, but they are constantly broken by recitative. With the entry of the Giants the music makes, so to say, a fresh start.
Lilly Lehmann. Marie Lehmann. Lammert. SIEGMUND Herr NIEMANN. HUNDING Herr NIERING. WOTAN Herr BETZ. SIEGLINDE Frl. SCHEFZKY. BRÜNNHILDE Frau FRIEDRICH-MATERNA. FRICKA Frau VON GRÜN-SADLER. SIEGFRIED Herr UNGER. MIME Herr SCHLOSSER. DER WANDERER Herr BETZ. ALBERICH Herr HILL. FAFNER Herr VON REICHENBERG. ERDA Frau JÄIDA. BRÜNNHILDE Frau FRIEDRICH-MATERNA
What a Fricka, Brangaene, Ortrud, Sieglinde, Erda, this clever girl might become! She was musical, she was dramatic in temperament he let his imagination run away with him. She only sang an Oberbayerische yodel, and, while her voice was not very high, she contrived a falsetto that made her English listener shiver.
Taking account suddenly of the presence of Hunding, "Begone, slave!" he orders, "kneel before Fricka, inform her that Wotan's spear has taken vengeance of that which brought mockery upon her!... Begone!... Begone!..." But at the gesture with which the command is emphasised, Hunding drops dead, crushed out of life by the god's contempt.
This motive, the Valhalla motive and the fire motive are the principal ones carried into the Valkyrie from the Rhinegold; and an immense amount of new musical matter is introduced. We see no more of the inferior deities: we hear the stroke of Donner's hammer in a storm Lied, and Loge appears as consuming flame in the last act; but, excepting Wotan, only Fricka is seen again in human shape.
FRICKA had been a jealous spouse to him for so long that he had forgot she meant wisdom before she meant domestic order, and that, in any event, she was always a goddess. The FRICKA of that afternoon was so clear and sunny, so nobly conceived, that she made a whole atmosphere about herself and quite redeemed from shabbiness the helplessness and unscrupulousness of the gods.
All such sweet littlenesses must be left to the humble stupid giants to make their toil sweet to them; and the god must, after all, pay for Olympian power the same price the dwarf has paid for Plutonic power. Wotan has forgotten this in his dreams of greatness. Not so Fricka.
The meadow is on the brink of a ravine, beyond which, towering on distant heights, stands Godhome, a mighty castle, newly built as a house of state for the one-eyed god and his all-ruling wife. Wotan has not yet seen this castle except in his dreams: two giants have just built it for him whilst he slept; and the reality is before him for the first time when Fricka wakes him.
Brema's Fricka is noble and full of charm; Schumann-Heink sings the music of Erda with some sense of its mystery and of Waltraute in "Siegfried" with considerable passion; and Gulbranson has vastly improved her impersonation of Brünnhilde since last year.
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