Word: christa
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...free translation of the German, it sounded when Walter Berry and his wife Christa Ludwig went at it again last week, snapping and snarling at each other for everyone to hear. And those who did were delighted, for as the villainous Telramund and Ortrud in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Lohengrin, their domestic-quarrel scene was an electric charge in an otherwise static drama. They did not merely rant and rage: they insinuated, they needled, they enticed. Both marvelous singer-actors, they bent and shaded their voices in a seemingly infinite variety of veiled sneers, smiling threats...
...Christa Ludwig, 32, daughter of German Tenor Anton Ludwig, also prepped as a cabaret singer during the hungry days after World War II, worked on the side as a seamstress (one of her more dubious creations: a red, white and black frock made out of an old Nazi flag). Her mezzo-soprano mother advised her "not to fall in love in a small opera house because then you may have to leave him behind when you go to a big house." Dutifully, Ludwig poured her heart into her art for nine years, finally graduated to the Vienna State Opera...
...virtually stripped clean of scenery. Choristers stood in rigid rows like drill teams awaiting inspection; principal singers stirred hardly at all, and when they did, it was with the slow, deliberate movements of dream figures. The audience loved it, loudly bravoed Conductor Karl Böhm and Mezzo-Soprano Christa Ludwig. But the real star of the evening was not there: Richard Wagner's grandson Wieland...
...away all earlier versions of the work, including his own. A second new recording, by Herbert von Karajan (on Deutsche Grammophon), approaches the music more humanly and pleadingly -and the effect is surprisingly persuasive. His orchestra is the Berlin Philharmonic and two soloists are especially fine: Gundula Janowitz and Christa Ludwig. For majesty, take Klemperer; for beauty, Von Karajan...
...only opera uses the fairy tale merely as a symbol. When Bluebeard's last wife insists upon opening the doors in his dark castle, she intrudes upon his past and, to her sorrow, resurrects his other wives, still very much alive in his memory. Christa Ludwig is forceful as Judith, whose curiosity leads her to her doom, and Walter Berry (Christa's real-life husband) is mellowly desolate as Bluebeard. Sung in Hungarian, with Istvan Kertesz conducting the London Symphony Orchestra...