Word: daly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...looked for a designer for the Royal Opera House's first Salome of its own since 1936 who could "reflect visually both the cold, fantastic imagery of Wilde's text and the hot eroticism of [the late Richard] Strauss's music." In mustached Surrealist Salvador Dali, he thought he had found his man. Gleefully, producer and designer hatched their plans. Dali wanted to have Salome's brassiere equipped with fireworks that would shoot off sparks at the end of her Dance of the Seven Veils; also to have a flying hippopotamus zooming over the stage...
...Madrid, Surrealist Salvador Dali put on his own version of Don Juan Tenorio, Spain's traditional All Souls' Day show. "I am too much of a Spaniard and a necrophile," he said cheerfully, "to miss this chance-food and tombs on stage together." Startled first-nighters saw the heroine clad as half nun and half Easter lily, her duenna completely faceless, another nun headless and one tavern character with two heads. Among huge fish, crawling monsters and enormous yellow butterflies, danced a coquettish, bell-shaped madonna. Exulted Dali: "I have never done anything so absolutely...
...surrealists appeared to be on the decline. Max Ernst's bilious yellow Feast of the Gods looked somewhat as if Ernst thought the gods dined on toadstools and mustard. The cleverest thing about Salvador Dali's photographically sharp picture of a cloth egg under a parasol was its title: Geopoliticus...
...critics liked it; one thought Mad Tristan "beautifully presented." But the Times spoke for the majority: "Regurgitation is a hygienic, not an artistic, process. Salvador Dali, turning aside from surrealistic painting to drama, has swallowed Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and spewed it up with much of the murky contents of his unconscious adhering to the gobbets...
...customers who still did not get the pitch, the program notes explained: "Dali sees the whole romantic philosophy of Wagner as an uninterrupted complex of impotence. An exasperating procession of wheelbarrows, heavy with the earth of reality, struggling up toward the inaccessible heaven of the ecstasy of love, at the summit of which there is only a precipice-love in death and death in love . . ." Only the New Statesman and Nation had the wit to smile at such Daliance and say the sanest thing heard in the hubbub: "How odd that people should have taken Mad Tristan ... so seriously...