Word: tristan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...grandsons were at it again. Last year they shocked old-line Wagnerites by ditching the old three-dimensional scenery, stripping heroines of their winged helmets, and generally flouting sacred traditions. Last week, continuing to modernize grandfather, they opened the second postwar season at Bayreuth with a streamlined version of Tristan and Isolde...
...sets contained a minimum of props. Act I was furnished with a single couch for Isolde (not a sign of the usual sail or sailors); there was no castle in Act II and none of the customary trees in Act III. The stage sloped so steeply that Tristan on his couch almost seemed in danger of rolling into the orchestra...
Said Wieland: "I want to concentrate on the persons." His other general idea was to avoid the style of a 19th century romantic love story and display Tristan as the "erotic mystery" he thinks "the old man" meant...
...revolution was the use of top singers who had not come up through the German chain of promotion (from provincial opera houses to major cities to Bayreuth). Chilean Tenor Ramon Vinay, familiar at the Metropolitan Opera but a stranger to Germany, looked handsome and heroic and sang brilliantly as Tristan. German Soprano Martha Moedl, 37, had begun to sing only eight years ago, but was a warm, natural Isolde. The Brangaene was a Ukrainian contralto named Era Malaniuk. Whatever the critics thought of the sets. they seemed to agree that the new Tristan was a fine musical success...
...said A.B.C., resembles a Crucifixion by the 81-year-old French artist Auguste Leroux. A dog in a recent Dali picture is the image of a dog in Anye Bru's Martyrdom of St. Mcdin (circa 1500), and the Dali horses in his set for the ballet Mad Tristan look like John Frederick Herring's 19th century favorite, Pharaoh's Horses. A.B.C. captioned its story "Three Coincidences," and let its readers judge for themselves...