Posting will probably be light this week, as I’m in Manhattan for the Kirov production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met. Intriguingly, they’ve decided to give the operas an Egyptian gloss—which works out nicely, since my father, with whom I’m seeing them, is an amateur Egyptologist. (I’m glad I was born during his Roman phase: He tells me that now, he would have named me Ramses.) At the close of Das Rheingold, Wotan and Fricka don headdresses of gods he identified as Sekhmet and Anubis. The latter makes a certain amount of sense given the deathwish Wotan develops over the course of the cycle; I’m still puzzling out the significance of Sekhmet. Possibly the intended reference is to her role as “Avenger of Wrongs,” prefiguring her insistence in tonight’s opera on taking Hunding’s side against Siegmund, incensed by the latter’s incestuous affair with Hunding’s wife (and Siegmund’s own sister) Sieglinde.