Word: tristans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Down on Your Knees. This year is the 150th anniversary of Wagner's birth, and Bayreuth Festival pilgrims whose health can stand it may see, in a single week, the complete Ring (14½ hours), Parsifal (4½ hours), Tristan and Isolde (4 hours) and Die Meistersinger (4½ hours). Among each night's full house are a dozen or so operatic masochists who attend every festival performance every year-an annual dose of 111 hours of straight Wagner swallowed in only 28 days. If this regime is not enough to cure them, there are museums that boast...
...complained that Aeschylus stops his show four times early in its first act to insert a choric ode? It is likewise complained that the external action of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde all but stops in the second act, and does stop in the third. Yet if one understands what is going on in Wagner's orchestra, Tristanfrom beginning to end is a blaze of emotional excitement; and if one understands what is going on in the orchestra ("dancing-place" of the Chorus) in the Agamemnon, the blaze of intellectual excitement is almost unbearable... As if Beethoven, a poet...
...reversed all the conventional numbers; a hate duet replaced a love duet and a divorce ensemble took the place of a wedding march. He also wrote a one-act opera, Das Nusch-Nuschi, designed it for performance by Burmese marionettes, and worked in a parody of Tristan that outraged loyal Wagnerians. Since those high old days of the 1920s, Paul Hindemith has turned more serious, and his enormous output (including such masterpieces as the opera Mathis der Maler, the symphonies Symphonische Tänze and Die Harmonic der Welt) has established him as Germany's greatest living composer...
They would have little to go back to. An advance party that returned to Tristan last August reported that the volcano had ruined most of their houses, killed all their sheep, and destroyed the fish-freezing plant where many earned their living. But there were still fish in the sea, enough land for their potato crop, and green grass for the cattle. The exiles could hardly wait to leave. For though they had found good jobs and a warm reception in "h'England," most islanders -who are descended from sailors shipwrecked on the island in the 19th century -just...
...small, but by 1935, when she made her debut at the Met as Sieglinde in Die Walküre, it had grown into immense power and clarity, perfectly even throughout its great range. She had grown with it, and when, as Isolde, she embraced Lauritz Melchior's Tristan, 400 pounds of lovebird sang from the stage. But together they were 400 pounds of genius, too, and after them Wagner could never again be the same...