Word: opera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...been a lifetime of music. His first compositions were written when he was six; he kept working right up to his final illness. But for music lovers, nothing he wrote after 47 came near what he had done before. He never again reached the heights of his great opera, Der Rosenkavalier...
...loved art, collected El Grecos, Tintorettos and Rubenses. A genial man, he liked to play cards (skat) and drink beer, but usually had to sneak away from his strong-willed wife Pauline to do it. His favorite opera, he always said, was one he finished in 1923 called Intermezzo, the story of a musician and his termagant spouse...
Last week, Manhattan's little Lemonade Opera (TIME, Sept. 8, 1947 et seq.) gave Felix Mendelssohn's 120-year-old Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde (The Return from Abroad) a U.S. performance-but made no great impression with it. In fact, after three years of applauding the Lemonaders' fine selection of strange fruit, most listeners found Die Heimkehr (now titled The Stranger) a sorry piece of citrus indeed...
...fighting the good fight" for seven years (Felix had actually been on a six-month trip to England and Scotland); finally, after an imposter (the stranger) tries to pass himself off as the returned prodigal, the real son returns to his parents amid great rejoicing. But in the Lemonade Opera's church-basement opera house, even John (Man in the Moon) Gutman's fine translation and adaptation failed to give the action much charm or excitement...
Filmed on German locations, Male War Bride uses well-photographed landscapes as backdrops for its pratfalls and manages somehow to turn occupied Germany into a comic-opera set, peopled by quaint peasants and toy soldiers. With no dialogue worthy of deft Comedian Grant, it makes its major bid for comedy by turning him into a female impersonator...