Word: graf
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Died. Max Pruss, 69, captain of the airships Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg, who never fully recovered from burns suffered as he leaped from the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg when it exploded in Lakehurst, N.J. in 1937 (killing 36 people), but who steadfastly argued to the end that helium-filled dirigibles were the cheapest, safest and most comfortable form of air travel; of pneumonia; in Frankfort, West Germany...
Casting about for a suitable centennial opera last winter, Denver Symphony Conductor Saul Caston latched on to Puccini's "drama of love and redemption" in a California mining town, chiefly because it went well with Red Rocks' rugged mountain setting. Director Herbert Graf altered all references to California to read Colorado, hired Soprano Eleanor Steber to sing the role of Minnie the barkeep. To help fill his cavernous outdoor stage, he hired a covered wagon and a troupe of horses from a 4-H club. And to avoid frequent scene changes, he transferred the action in Acts...
...cues. In the waning hours before the curtain, carpenters hustled about frantically shoring up scenery. But on opening night, Puccini's grand old horse opera went off with scarcely a hitch, moved a capacity audience to reverberating applause. The heroes of the evening, in the eyes of Director Graf, were without question the Western quarter horses. "They don't sing, they don't argue, they take directions," said he, "and they act very well...
Critics chided the Metropolitan Opera's Herbert Graf for unimaginative staging but cheered the singers and especially the rediscovered score. Almost as successful was the evening's other revival: Strauss's seldom-done ballet. Josepkslegende, which he wrote in 1914 on commission from Diaghilev. In the last six summers, by emphasizing the works of Home Town Boy Strauss. Munich's opera festival has risen to rank with many of Europe's best, attracts opera fans en route from Salzburg to Bayreuth. And in the bout between Munich's conservatives and their nose-thumbing native...
Died. Max Graf, 84, music critic who reached fame in Emperor Franz Josef's fin-de-siècle Vienna, author of Modern Music, Composer and Critic, Legend of a Musical City; of a stroke; in Vienna. Friend and appraiser of Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss aging Max Graf recoiled as the Nazis took the Vienna woods, later wrote that "it required three centuries to make Vienna a musical city; one day sufficed to destroy this historic edifice." Fleeing to the U.S., he taught at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, became...