Word: mets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pacific Coast's Australian-born International Longshoremen's Boss Harry Bridges, who rocks with the Reds but enrolls with the Republicans, hove into a California court and met an old acquaintance, Restaurateuse Sally Stanford (real name: Mabel Janice Busby), now retired from a crimson career as one of San Francisco's red-hot madams (her once-elegant Pine Street hostelry is now a booze dispensary called the Fallen Angel). At the Valhalla, Sally's fancy restaurant in Sausalito, Bridges was caught in the men's room last September by two seamen, both unfriendly members...
...burdened it in the past. Ponderous gods and goddesses lumbered clumsily toward one another across the gigantic stage. Papier-mâché dragons belched steam, dwarfs disappeared in clouds of vapor, magic fires raced across the sky at the wave of a wand. For reasons of economy, the Met made no effort to replace the worn sets originally designed and constructed for the Ring nearly a decade ago. A complete restaging, estimates Manager Bing, would cost a prohibitive $300,000. Though he refuses to go to Bayreuth because of its Nazi associations, Bing admires Bayreuth's modernistic, bare...
...Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung) for the first time in six years. Somewhat to Bing's surprise, it was a smash hit. The Wagner-starved public queued up for tickets: "It was as if Callas were singing Lucia''' Result: the Met decided to follow up the two scheduled Rings with a third cycle starting next week, the first such three-Ring circus in any regular season in Met history...
Same Old Dragons. All that the Ring has lacked at the Met, according to Wagner fans, has been heroic-voiced singers to fill its gargantuan roles. But the present Ring succeeded with sporadically fine singing and occasional bursts of orchestral brilliance. For the occasion, Bing imported Bayreuth's Martha Moedl (as Brünnhilde), Wolfgang Windgassen (as Siegmund and Siegfried), and Marianne Schech of the Munich Staatsoper (as Sieglinde and Gutrune). All three gave occasionally fine performances, but no one of them dominated the stage in the spacious manner of a Kirsten Flagstad, a Helen Traubel or a Lauritz...
Nevertheless, the Ring cycle will continue to be a periodic, if not an annual, part of the Met's repertory. "After all," says Bing, "Wagner was one of the great geniuses of his age. So it does not matter whether I like...