Word: tristan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Wagner began redraping Grandfather Richard's operas in modern scenic dress seven years ago, première audiences at the Bayreuth Festival have usually focused more on the props than the performance. But last week at the festival's curtain raiser-a new Wolfgang Wagner production of Tristan und Isolde-all ears were sharply tuned to the sounds coming out of the concealed orchestra pit. There Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, at 34 perhaps the most gifted German conductor to emerge since Herbert von Karajan and the youngest ever to conduct at Bayreuth, was making his most important operatic debut...
Flaws & Cheers. If the production itself was undistinguished (marked, said Wolfgang Wagner, by "objective sobriety"), the first yearning sighs of the orchestral prelude left little doubt that this Tristan was in expert hands. Dressed in tuxedo trousers and open-throated shirt, Conductor Sawallisch led his orchestra through a performance marked by a water-clear sense of orchestral relationships and rock-sure control. He attacked at a slower than usual tempo, underscored the sensuous quality of the music without letting his orchestra wallow in it. There were the usual first-night flaws. During the second-act love duet, the word...
...befits a man who has spent much of his professional life expiring at the top of his voice (he has logged 227 hours of dying time in Tristan alone), Siegfried-sized Tenor Lauritz Melchior knows his deathbed bathos down to the last Cheyne-Stokes wheeze. When bandits hopped the fence of his Beverly Hills estate last week, bound him with neckties and began looting the place, the 67-year-old Dane huffed and puffed like a heart-attack victim, sagged to his chair in feigned death throes (Tristan und Isolde, Act III) to frighten them off. Said...
...opera: Tristan und Isolde. The occasion: Florence's Maggio Musicale. In charge: eccentric, peripatetic Conductor Artur Rodzinski (born a Pole in Yugoslavia, he is a longtime U.S. citizen, now lives in Italy). Among leading singers: Swedish Soprano Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Cleveland's Mezzo-Soprano Grace Hoffman as Brangane, German Heldentenor Wolfgang Windgassen as Tristan...
Rodzinski has conducted Tristan more than 40 times, spent weeks before the Florence rehearsals restudying the score. He drilled his temperamental Italian orchestra mercilessly, rehearsed his cast, chorus and orchestra from 9 a.m. till midnight. Ruthlessly he excised musical sentimentalities, toned down the deathbed exuberance of handsome Tenor Windgassen ("You're practically dead. You can hardly talk, let alone sing"). On opening night last week, a big share of the applause went to Soprano Nilsson, who was compared to the great Kirsten Flagstad. But the star of the occasion was Rodzinski himself. Perched on a high stool...