Word: shadowings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...realized," said Richard Strauss of the Meisterwerk of his middle age, "that the opera would never have much success." He was speaking of Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), the huge complex of mythology and symbolism that he constructed with Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal during World War I. Strauss guessed correctly: since its premiere in Vienna in 1919, the work has rarely been staged in Europe and never in the U.S. Last week Die Frau finally appeared on a U.S. stage in a San Francisco Opera production that made cheering audiences wonder where she had been...
Poet von Hofmannsthal's libretto, embroidered with the common myths of half a dozen cultures, concerns a beautiful empress who is unable to cast a shadow and hence to bear children. In search of a shadow, she persuades a dyer's wife to surrender her own, and thus renounce her power to bear children, for luxuries and an imaginary romance. In a mirage of symbolism about human and superhuman love, selfish and selfless love, the dyer's wife eventually realizes that she loves her husband, and the empress sees that she herself cannot buy love in exchange...
...cast were California-born Mezzo-Soprano Irene Dalis as a malevolent nurse and German Soprano Marianne Schech as the dyer's wife. Conductor Leopold Ludwig whipped his orchestra through the complex, luxuriant score with a fine sense of surging lyricism, a deft feel for the opera's shadow-flittery moods. "No matter what may happen to the Giants," glowed the Chronicle's Alfred Frankenstein, "San Francisco won the pennant Friday night...
...action was so dull at the U.S. tennis nationals at Forest Hills last week that the New York Times's Allyn Baum, looking for a new angle, snapped Peru's Alex Olmedo lunging for a ball. The Times airbrushed out the player and printed his shadow, making it look like an ancient cave painting (see cut). The picture made a telling point: amateur tennis was only a shadow of its former self...
Yamasaki took advantage of a long convalescence to go to Japan. He was captivated by what he saw in its architecture: the interplay of light and shadow, the union of building and garden. He came back to cast a jaundiced eye on the serried ranks of glass boxes rising along the main streets of Manhattan and other major cities. "Our life gives promise of being spent in look-alike houses, look-alike automobiles and look-alike buildings," he warned his fellow architects...