Word: tristans
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When Paul Hindemith wrote a parody of Tristan into an early opera, the offense to Wagner stirred up a resentment in his native Germany that lingered on for years. In the '30s, when his music had attained the clean, clear shape of neoclassicism, the Nazis banned it because of its antiRomantic ring. And after the war, when Hindemith returned to Europe after 13 years in the U.S., he was widely considered a walking anachronism by the new musical revolutionaries. In youth, he had been called "the playboy." In age, he was "the academician." In more than 40 prolific years...
...Duke Max lived to see the opera house rebuilt, and by the time his grandson, mad King Ludwig, was on the Bavarian throne, productions there had reached such a pitch of grandeur that the world premiere of Tristan und Isolde was largely responsible for Prussia's defeat of the Royal Bavarian Army in 1866; after the opera, there was no money left for the guns. The defeated Ludwig, bewitched by Wagner, staged three more premieres before he succumbed to a paranoid fear of crowds that kept him away from opening nights. "Each time I enter my box," he said...
...young and fanatically loyal staff, often takes off in one of the company's private planes to close a sales deal if he thinks his presence will help. He has led a civic-reform drive in Youngstown, is an opera buff who collects old Caruso records and prefers Tristan and Isolde above all other operas...
...along with recordings of Lily Pons in The Bell Song and Basso Boris Chaliapin in The Song of the Flea-note for note, pitch for pitch. The vocal range she developed eventually settled into an astonishing reach of three octaves -minus one note-more than enough | to sing both Tristan and Isolde. But every sound she is capable of making is required by the freak music she now sings. At 35, Cathy Berberian is the first lady of far-out song...
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...