Word: tristan
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...around, but he had built the orchestra again into a first-rate symphony, using the same old hands (only the piano player and the first horn were new). He had given Chicagoans the finest opera they had heard in years: a concert version of Elektra with Marjorie Lawrence, and Tristan und Isolde with Kirsten Flagstad. He had given the musicians some rough treatment at rehearsals -but no conductor was ever fired for that, so long as he produced good music...
...Eternal Return (Paulve; Discina). The medieval bards sang of Tristan and Iseult as huge, cloudy symbols of high romance; later storytellers (Swinburne, Wagner, Tennyson, E. A. Robinson et al.) further enriched (or corrupted) the tale with new ideas and idioms. Now the French poet-moviemaker, Jean Cocteau, has handsomely reset the legend in modern dress. His title, The Eternal Return, is the term Nietzsche gave to the mournfully romantic doctrine of endless historical repetition. The Nietzschean note tolls through the film like a sunken bell...
Cocteau has cleverly managed to waken the body of the legend to 20th Century life without rousing its spirit from medieval slumbers. His rattling flivvers and gleaming bathrooms are woven into the fine fabric of the ancient Tristan and Iseult legend like bright new threads into a shadowy old tapestry...
Metropolitan Opera (Sat. 2 p.m., ABC). Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, with Helen Traubel and Lauritz Melchior...
...Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, Love Duet (Helen Traubel, soprano; Torsten Ralf, tenor; Herta Glaz, contralto, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Fritz Busch conducting; Columbia, 4 sides). Traubel & Ralf take the famed love duet faster than Flagstad and Melchior. The result is surprisingly warmer, and the orchestral setting is fuller. Recording: good...