Word: tannh
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Richard Wagner was determined to make a name for himself in Paris. So when the Paris Opéra rejected his latest work, Tristan und Isolde, Wagner dusted off his Tannhäuser, which had been produced in Dresden 16 years earlier, and Frenchified it. He wrote new music for a ballet in the first scene and reworked the character and music of the love goddess Venus in his best chromatic, post-Tristan style...
...nearly a century the Paris Tannhäuser remained the most frequently performed version of the opera. Audiences loved the voluptuous new bacchanale; sopranos preferred to sing the more dramatic music of Venus. But eventually purists objected to the musical schizophrenia in the work, and came to prefer the earlier Dresden Tannhäuser. All the recordings, too, used the Dresden score until last week, when London released the first LPs of the Paris version-a premiere of sorts...
...baseball cap. Papa is a fat slob in unbuttoned pajamas, who has spent a lifetime dabbling in experimental theater. Mama reminisces over an early tussle for bohemian freedom in which she and Papa made love in the front row of the orchestra during a performance of Tannhäuser. Currently, she sleeps with a grinning Neanderthal manservant named Eddie, while Papa affects not to notice...
...suburban house, bankrolled the first productions of his most famous operas. Atop the Munich Residence he built a huge greenhouse with a lily pond. Floating in a barge clad as Lohengrin, he watched slides of the Venusberg cast on the walls by a projector, while a hidden orchestra played Tannhäuser. Though World War II bombs shattered the greenhouse, the red-cushioned barge has been reinstalled on a blue-lit lake of mirror...
Allegro. He is born on Musikalnyi Peruelok - Music Street - in Kiev. His uncle is a music critic, his mother a brilliant amateur pianist. At the age of ten he memorizes the piano scores of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Parsifal. Clearly, little Vladimir is a musical prodigy...