Word: tterd
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When the curtain rises on Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Dusk of the Gods), three Norns are spinning the dark threads of Wotan's fate. During the next four and a half hours Siegfried is speared in the back, his half-divine wife follows him onto the pyre and all Valhalla collapses in flames. Because Götterdämmerung is the longest and most difficult opera in Wagner's Ring, it is sung more rarely than the others. People squeezed into every available inch of standing room one afternoon last week when Manhattan...
...nnhilde in Götterdämmerung is the hardest role in all grand opera. She suffers such violent emotions, has to sing such grueling high passages, that few singers have ever made her sound convincing. Wagner used to pace the floor in anguish while writing Brünnhilde's songs. Time and again he asked himself whether any woman alive would be equal to them. Last week's audience again marveled at Kirsten Flagstad's command of the role, the way she used her strong, rich voice to convey Brünnhilde's unutterable happiness...
Queen Mary alone played her role not in jazz time but with the stateliness of Wagnerian opera. For Her Majesty and all she stood for it might be Götterdämmerung ("Twilight of the Gods"), but she was far from "broken and weeping" as some dispatches reported. Just as they were being printed the Queen drove out in her regal Daimler. The chauffeur bowled along at moderate pace through a middle-class section of London and presently Queen Mary inspected through her lorgnette the still smoking ruins of the $10,000,000 Crystal Palace on which Queen Victoria...
...might interpret, that his records would help young conductors with their phrasing and their tempi. Result was the release last week of a Toscanini Wagner album,* which included the Preludes to the first and third acts of Lohengrin; Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung; the tender Siegfried Idyll, composed by Wagner as a Christmas serenade for his wife Cosima the year after their son Siegfried was born. The Toscanini performances are peerless, the recordings faithful. First week sales were unparalleled, according to record dealers, since the days of Caruso. From headquarters in Camden...
...come cheap compared with new productions. Of the 19 new singers, only two achieved a real success. One was Australia's Marjorie Lawrence, who at 28 and with only three years' opera experience undertook the difficult Brünnhildes in Die Walküre and Götterdäm-merung, made news in the latter by mounting her horse, actually galloping from the stage in accordance with Wagner's ambitious directions. The other was Sweden's Gertrud Wettergren, who proved herself a sure singing actress, strode the stage regally as Amneris...