Word: liebestod
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...like the Liebestod that had killed Isolde on a hundred nights at the opera. The great Wagnerian voice had risen, had touched all the heroic notes, had softened, had faded, had died. For 20 years she was the world's greatest soprano and for nearly 40 it was hard to imagine Wagner without her. Then, last week, at 67, after a bedridden year, Kirsten Flagstad died...
...Norway's south coast. There, amid heavy paintings and great music, she knitted, played solitaire, entertained her friends with evenings of Schumann and Schubert, softly singing the lieder to her own accompaniment. And always, there was the suggestion that given some encouragement, she could still sing the great Liebestod, the song of love-unto-death that belonged to Flagstad...
...various ways-the mother by marrying every man she meets instead of "just sleeping with them," the younger daughter by sleeping with everybody she cannot bear to marry, and the older daughter, Joan, by riding New Orleans streetcars and listening far into the night to Wagner's Liebestod. Boredom and jealousy of her sister lead Joan into an affair, and soon she finds herself pregnant. She has an abortion, and what follows is a subtly detailed, enormously effective chronicle of mental collapse. When she learns that her lover is having an affair with someone else, she takes to roaming...
Putting the Touch. Daughter of Samuel Schafer, a Manhattan stockbroker, Minnie studied piano as a girl, later grimly entertained her husband, Lawyer Charles Guggenheimer, with "my $1,000 piece, Isolde's Liebestod." When she took on her stadium chores, she gave up the piano, and apparently has not looked seriously at music since. Her musical miscues are leg endary. Reading from notes during one of her stadium intermission talks, she an nounced that the coming attraction would be "Ezio Pinza Bass," and then added over the roars of laughter: "Oh no, that can't be right; that...
Tristan at the Met remains Isolde's show, however. Brangaene is important in the first half but insignificant for the final effect. The Liebestod constitutes the climax of Tristan. To this superb music and its terrific challenge, Nilsson brings endless energy and intelligence. The perfectly spun phrases follow one another in a demonstration of endurance and artistry that has an almost hypnotic effect...