Word: das
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...drawn to Marxism and the U.S.S.R. in the light of Chamberlain's appeasement policy, but went on to admit that it was the influence of Burgess that led him to translate this vague sympathy into active service on behalf of the KGB. I cannot, in any case, see Das Kapital as his bedside book...
Each of the four operas takes less than an hour, and the whole evening adds up to about four hours in all--less than any one of the original operas except the "prologue" Das Rheingold. Sellars handles the musical cuts as skillfully as possible, and except for some of the act endings in Die Walkure and Siegfried, which he uncomfortably splices straight into the next scenes, they are not unsettling. Of course, Wagner's meticulous structure of leitmotifs crumbles to the ground. But from the opening of Rheingold, when Sellars' voice and the rustle of silver paper (standing...
...production savors the visual opportunities of Das Rheingold, wringing it of every bit of spectacle--including towering potato-sack giants. Die Walkure, the best of the four adaptations, flows well musically; Sellars cuts out nearly the entire second act. Though that act, with a 25-minute monologue from Wotan, is the ideological lynchpin of the whole cycle, it rightly is the first to go in a conception of the Ring as entertainment. Walkure also benefits from the absence of Sellars' sometimes-intrusive narration. The presentation races through Siegfried, barely pausing for Siegfried to slaughter a garbage-bag Fafner, and into...
...real problem with presenting Wagner in translation is that it exposes all the confusion in Wagner's thinking. No one is sure just what he intended his mythological, melodramatic "music-dramas" to mean, and it's likely that he never knew himself. Das Rheingold, the first opera in the cycle, shows heavy socialist influence, and some critics say Wagner's early sketches of the character Siegfried were based on Mikhail Bakunin, the mid-nineteenth century anarchist. But in the decade between the composition of acts II and III of Siegfried, the third opera in the cycle--during which Wagner wrote...
...wrestles with these problems for 667 pages; the result is a fascinating draw. A self-described "Jeffersonian democrat," Padover exhibits an intimate and often lurid portrait. As an adolescent, Marx embraced Christ, then, in a long hysterical poem, identified himself with Lucifer. During the exhausting research and writing of Das Kapital, he was plagued by illnesses ranging from carbuncles to chronic liver inflammation. Padover shows the father of socialism distracting himself from the pain and humiliation of a carbuncle on the scrotum by quoting pornographic French verse in a letter to his German collaborator, Frederick Engels. More appealingly, there...