Word: br
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...like a Trappist monastery. Long before the curtain went up on Das Rheingold, which opens the cycle, the cafés were humming with musical gossip: Tenor Reiner Goldberg, Solti's original choice to sing the difficult role of Siegfried, had been fired (true). Soprano Hildegard Behrens, the Brünnhilde, had quit (false). The Hall production, with sets by Designer William Dudley, would be the biggest fiasco since ... well, since 1976, when Patrice Chéreau scandalized the good burghers with his iconoclastic, neo-Marxist Ring...
...bright spots amid the prevailing gloom. Tenor Siegfried Jerusalem (Siegmund) and American Soprano Jeannine Altmeyer (Sieglinde) made a hot-blooded pair of incestuous lovers in Die Walküre, and Baritone Hermann Becht's Alberich was powerfully sung. Hildegard Behrens unleashed her blazing, radiant soprano as Brünnhilde, the fallen Valkyrie whose ultimate sacrifice defeats Alberich's evil and purifies the world for the coming new order...
...production is not to degenerate into a series of pretty stage pictures. Characters must be sharply focused, their complex relationships made clear. They cannot be allowed to wander aimlessly across the stage, as Hall lets them do in Rheingold, or strike arbitrary, stylized postures: Wotan singing to Brünnhilde while lying flat on his back in Die Walküre, for example...
DIED. Maxie Leroy Anderson, 48, daredevil, eye-patched balloonist who captured the world's delighted attention in 1978 when he and two fellow aeronauts made the first transatlantic crossing in the silvery Double Eagle II; in a balloon crash; in Brückenau, West Germany. After amassing a mining fortune, Anderson took up ballooning as "a way of entering history." In his final flight, Anderson and frequent Co-Pilot Don Ida, 49, were desperately trying to land before drifting into East Germany when their gondola became detached and the two adventurers plunged 2,000 ft. to their deaths...
...satirical spirit that animated the hit Broadway show has been dispensed with. The new film, like its predecessor has as its sole aim the corruption of chil dren under the age of 14. Not that it will impair them morally. No, the aim is to generate false, commercialized nostalgia br what is made to seem a simpler, yet more colorful teen time than their own. The movie strains and strains for the effect Gregory's Girl achieves without trying, perhaps did not consciously intend...