Word: elsas
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...history is more cryptic than that of Noah Cross (John Huston in Chinatown), ruthless Los Angeles pioneer, father to his own granddaughter and possible sire of Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai). He is the omnipotent wizard in Thomson's sinister Oz, an America whose center is located in Bedford Falls, Neb. It is a mythical place of lost innocence and the home of George Bailey, who watches SAC bombers over the cornfields of his youth and concludes that "America is just a story of its men and women going from happiness to stoicism...
...Italian hill country between Arezzo and Siena. To prevent his English from becoming too Italianized, he makes yearly trips to New York City, where he consults with his most "nurturing" publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich's Helen Wolff. When Weaver is not translating such writers as Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante and Italo Calvino, he reads vast quantities of American mysteries, which he reviews for the London Financial Times. "Crime books," he maintains, "are very good at keeping you abreast of what people are saying back home...
...slowly, pacing himself for the nearly five-hour evening. His singing in Act I was careful but not tentative; he infused Lohengrin's valedictory to his swan with the wistful Italianate warmth of a love song. In the second act, he sang passionately as Lohengrin tries to protect Elsa, his betrothed, from Ortrud's Iago-like machinations. By the third act, he was in full command, delivering the difficult Grail narration, in which Lohengrin sorrowfully reveals his identity and his obligation to leave Elsa, with power and poignancy. It may not have been idiomatic, but it was elegant...
...Marton's villainy was Tomowa-Sintow, a lyric soprano with a pure, unforced voice that improved after a somewhat shaky first act; her fateful exchange with Ortrud in the second act's balcony scene evoked the stark contrast of light and dark that Wagner wanted. Alas, Elsa is not the most dramatically complex of Wagner's heroines, and Tomowa-Sintow was content to play her one-dimensionally. Although somewhat uncertain of intonation and raspy of tone, Nentwig admirably portrayed Telramund's moral degeneration...
...production by August Everding, general manager of the Bavarian State Theater, follows the contemporary European fashion of outfitting Wagner's operas in morally ambiguous shades of gray. His 10th century Brabant is a dour place; pageantry blossoms only during Lohengrin and Elsa's wedding, and the famous swan is banished to the world of the imagination. While this approach has a certain intellectual and historical validity, perhaps the time has come again for a romantic, representational Lohengrin, for Everding's interpretation is fundamentally at odds with the A-major radiance of the score...