Word: siegmunds
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Still, there were a few bright spots amid the prevailing gloom. Tenor Siegfried Jerusalem (Siegmund) and American Soprano Jeannine Altmeyer (Sieglinde) made a hot-blooded pair of incestuous lovers in Die Walküre, and Baritone Hermann Becht's Alberich was powerfully sung. Hildegard Behrens unleashed her blazing, radiant soprano as Brünnhilde, the fallen Valkyrie whose ultimate sacrifice defeats Alberich's evil and purifies the world for the coming new order...
Some of the singing, too, came in for heavy criticism. Bass-Baritone Siegmund Nimsgern has a rich resonant voice but brought little sense of Wotan's majestic agony to his portrayal. After Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, he canceled his appearance in Siegfried and was replaced by a weak Bent Norup. Poor Manfred Jung, the substitute Siegfried, is physically unprepossessing and vocally inadequate to this most heroic of heldentenor roles, which demands both strength and stamina. Although he gave it a game effort, especially in Götterdammerung, Jung put one in mind of Scholar-Critic Ernest...
...DIED. Siegmund Warburg, 80, energetic German-born banker who startled the closed-door world of London merchant banking with his unorthodox innovations; in London. The cultured scion of a centuries-old Jewish financial dynasty, Warburg fled Nazi Germany for London in 1934. In 1939 he founded his own trading company and in 1946 his own bank. Combining Teutonic discipline with new ideas, he managed the first U.S. corporate-bond issue in Europe and masterminded Tube Investments' and Reynolds Metals' takeover of British Aluminium...
Wagner: Parsifal (Tenor Peter Hofmann, Bass-Baritone José van Dam, Mezzo Dunja Vejzovic, Bass-Baritone Siegmund Nimsgern, Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and Deutsche Oper Berlin Chorus; Deutsche Grammophon, five records). Wagner's last and most difficult music drama has not had a really satisfying recording-until now. Hofmann makes Parsifal both strong and guileless, the splendid Van Dam is an anguished Amfortas, and Nimsgern is an evil, but not inhuman Klingsor. Only Vejzovic, a screechy Kundry, is weak. The real stars are Karajan and his Berliners, who capture the score's glowing spirituality...
...puppets, which represent most of the characters. Members of the company wave the muppet-like Rhinemaidens about in time to the music, and open their mouths as they "sing"--even "swimming" a little bit higher for the really high notes. Life-size dummies manipulated by two actors apiece "play" Siegmund and Sieglinde about as well as most opera singers; the hand gestures and postures brilliantly satire the declamatory incompetence of most heldentenors and dramatic sopranos...