Word: bayreuth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...worst thing about Goldwyn's Porgy, though, is its cinematic monotony. The film is not so much a motion picture as a photographed opera. Just to make sure the customers get the point, Vienna-born Director Otto Preminger has directed most of it as though it were a Bayreuth production of Gōtterdāmmerung, Choruses march and countermarch; actors lumber woodenly about the stage, obviously counting their steps, and then suddenly take up a stance and break into song. And for some strange, wrong reason -perhaps to give the show an elevated, operatic tone-the actors speak...
German Director Carl Ebert, general manager of West Berlin's Municipal Opera, superbly handled his cast and particularly the Met's often heavy-footed chorus, achieved some stunning, stylized patterns reminiscent of Bayreuth. Highly effective were the glowingly expressionistic sets by German Designer Caspar Neher, but his costumes were merely foolish: mauve, mustard, rose and lavender, suitable for a Todd A-O musical version of the Wars of the Roses. If Designer Neher tried to follow the romantic music by being deliberately unrealistic, he spoiled his effect with just enough realistic touches, as when platoons of soldiers...
...ballet. Josepkslegende, which he wrote in 1914 on commission from Diaghilev. In the last six summers, by emphasizing the works of Home Town Boy Strauss. Munich's opera festival has risen to rank with many of Europe's best, attracts opera fans en route from Salzburg to Bayreuth. And in the bout between Munich's conservatives and their nose-thumbing native son. there is no longer any doubt as to who has won the decision...
...incident could not have happened last week at Bayreuth, where Richard Wagner's grandson Wieland staged a Lohengrin so abstract that the swan was merely a sketchily suggested stationary prop, while the hero made his exit on a descending elevator platform. Since 1951. Wieland Wagner, 41, alternating with his younger brother Wolfgang, 38, has been staging the most effective Wagner productions to be seen anywhere. (He has now redraped all the standard Wagner operas with the exception of The Flying Dutchman, which he will stage in 1960.) Last week's de-swanned Lohengrin was among the best...
...whole production displayed the Rorschach-test symmetry of design which has become one of Wieland's trademarks; e.g., in the bridal scene, when one chorister inclined his head toward the center, another on the opposite side of the stage precisely imitated him. For the first time anyone at Bayreuth can remember, cuts were made in a Wagnerian score; stage action was reduced to such bare essentials that the production was almost as close to oratorio as opera (Wieland prefers to call it a "Christian mystery...