Word: missing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Birgit Nilsson is the world's reigning Wagnerian soprano. Austria's Herbert von Karajan has no superior as a conductor of the Ring cycle. Alas, two great melodies do not always pro duce a single pleasing harmony. Ever since she began singing under his demanding baton, Miss Nilsson's relation ship with the Salzburg-born maestro has become increasingly sour. Among other things, she has been irked by his insistence on unusually time-consuming rehearsals and is not too keen about his dark, brooding lighting effects, which often keep the singers in the shadows. "I could walk...
Last week, in the temperamental tradition of opera's prima donnas, Miss Nilsson did indeed walk out on the Met. She not only refused to sing as Brünnhilde in the 1970 premiere of the new Von Karajan production of Götterdämmerung, but also canceled her scheduled performances next season in Ariadne auf Naxos. Her reason: the Met was letting that nasty Von Karajan whittle down the number of her performances in order to introduce a younger Viennese protegee, Soprano Helga Dernesch, to New York audiences. "When the birds are not happy," throbbed Miss Nilsson...
Still scarred by memories of his war with the tempestuous Maria Callas, Impresario Bing tried to absolve his conductor and soothe his diva. Miss Dernesch, he explained, had merely been engaged as an understudy: "Even Madame Nilsson, as immortal as she is, can get sick occasionally." But since the Austrian soprano was coming all the way to New York, he added, she at least deserves the chance to give one performance in Von Karajan's critically acclaimed production of the Ring. From Vienna, the conductor supplied an obbligato of support to Bing's explanation...
Occasionally, Miss Frame breathes life into her tale of death with her poet's gift of language. Indeed, the best part of the novel is an interlude of exuberant Joycean punning when Godfrey's death-scrambled brain cannot help turning words inside out. For example, he reads "The Drol's Pryer...
...Miss Frame scrambled her characters and their actions with comparable imaginativeness, this would be a much better novel-or, as Godfrey might have put it, a chum berett loven...