Saturday, July 16, 1966.

. . . the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in

the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives
cherished it for being small and inconvenient . . . and the sentimental
clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent
acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of
music.

—Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.

I was twelve years old and had just completed the eighth grade.
My mother had given me money to buy a phonograph record. I
chose conductor Erich Leinsdorf’s recording of highlights of
Wagner’s Ring Cycle opera, Die Walküre, featuring the tenor Jon
Vickers as the hero Siegmund.

I ultimately got to see a performance of the opera at the Academy

of Music in Philadelphia on the evening of Tuesday, December
14, 1976—again with Jon Vickers as Siegmund. I recall the
following morning I chatted about the opera performance with a
coworker at The Franklin Institute, Elena S. She said, “. . . and I
suppose there was a huge chorus.” I said, “no, this opera doesn’t
have any chorus”—though, in fact, the opera does feature an
unlikely choral troop of eight singing warrior maidens known as
the Valkyries. I later learned that Elena’s mother loved attending
theater and opera.
In Die Walküre, the chief Norse god, Wotan, banishes his favorite
daughter, Brünnhilde from Valhalla, the home of the gods, after
she disobeys his command not to assist her half-brother,
Siegmund in battle. Brünnhilde never speaks to her family again.
Die Walküre has been viewed as an allegory that “addresses the
dynamics of the dysfunctional family caused by inequality of
power and the loss of love.”