Word: strausses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...West Germany's Minister of Defense, beefy, hard-driving Franz Josef Strauss has been a vigorous foe of Prussianism. Whenever the officers of West Germany's new, "democratic" army showed any signs of reverting to the autocratic traditions of the Junkers, Bavarian-born Minister Strauss cracked down hard-and thereby won the applause of most of his countrymen. But last week Franz Josef Strauss was learning firsthand the full depth of West Germans' postwar distaste for jack-in-office arrogance...
...trouble began when Strauss, on his way to an appointment with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, decided to use a short cut-a small, one-way alley officially reserved for der Alte himself but informally open to any of his ministers. When Bonn Traffic Officer Siegfried Hahlbohm, 24, failed to give Strauss's car an immediate signal into the alley, the impatient minister ordered his driver, Leonhard Kaiser, to go ahead anyway. Kaiser did so, thereby forcing the conductor of an oncoming trolley car on the main thoroughfare to slam on his emergency brake. As Strauss's grey BMW sedan...
...Richard Strauss was born in Munich and lived there, or not far away, much of his life, but he feuded with the staid Münchners for rejecting his first (1893) opera, Guntram. The Munich Opera dropped it after only one disconsolate performance. Strauss's revenge: his very next opera, Feuersnot (1901), a go-minute twitting of Munich's conservative burghers. At the current Munich Festival, opera fans flocked to see their first Feuersnot in more than 20 years, heartily applauded the lampooning administered to them from across the footlights...
...sorcerer, whose ardor for the virgin Diemut scandalizes the whole town. Derided and humiliated by them. Kunrad takes his revenge by magically extinguishing every fire in Munich, leaving the helpless bluenoses in chilly darkness. Kunrad delivers a 20-minute homily to the chastened Münchners (dramatically cumbersome, but Strauss insisted he had written the opera only for the sake of that speech. Soon all Munich is busily engineering Kunrad's conquest and Diemut's capitulation-which occurs offstage but to almost pornophonically explicit music from the orchestra...
Critics chided the Metropolitan Opera's Herbert Graf for unimaginative staging but cheered the singers and especially the rediscovered score. Almost as successful was the evening's other revival: Strauss's seldom-done ballet. Josepkslegende, which he wrote in 1914 on commission from Diaghilev. In the last six summers, by emphasizing the works of Home Town Boy Strauss. Munich's opera festival has risen to rank with many of Europe's best, attracts opera fans en route from Salzburg to Bayreuth. And in the bout between Munich's conservatives and their nose-thumbing native...