Word: users
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...July weather. Technicians scrambled to lighten the murky stage so that the audience could see more of what was going on. After six weeks of preparing the season, Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner last week raised the curtain on the opening production, their grandfather's Tannhäuser. Despite all crises, the production turned out topnotch...
Bayreuth had not dared do Tannhäuser since Toscanini's unforgettable version 24 years ago. But brothers Wieland and Wolfgang, who will dare anything, decided the old Venusberg needed some drastic new landscaping. They hired fast-rising, Kiev-born Conductor Igor Markevitch, who had never done Wagnerian opera before, then replaced him with Germany's Joseph Keilberth. "I was not aware that anybody here was interested in tempo," huffed Markevitch at one point. "All they talk about is lighting"-and no wonder, for Director Wieland Wagner's new staging relies mainly on light effects. When...
Musically, the production proved to be more than adequate, despite the fact that Tenor Ramon Vinay and pretty Soprano Gre Brouenstein showed signs of strain. The chorus, one of the world's finest, performed brilliantly. But the chief attraction, as usual, was the staging. Wieland sees Tannhäuser as a harried misfit in a world of rigid conventions. Dressed in a black cloak (while the other minstrels wear brown), he moves among stiff, almost mechanized people of the court. Preparing for the crucial song contest in the second act-usually staged with casual confusion-uniformly dressed...
After the final curtain, half of the Bayreuth audience seemed in tears, clapped for 15 minutes. With Tannhäuser, the Bayreuth brothers have now redraped all the standard Wagner works in their new, bare, dramatically lighted dress. Their style has become a prototype for new Wagner productions in most major opera houses. Notable exception: New York's Metropolitan, whose Wagner producers seem never to have heard of Bayreuth's lighting, let alone Minsky...
...Alfalfa-seed tea, long a favorite home "remedy" for arthritis and diabetes, not only lacks curative powers, but may give the user severe skin eruptions. So reported Dr. William H. Kaufman, after a study of six skin cases in Roanoke, Va. He added that such skin ailments may be hard to diagnose, since most alfalfa-tea enthusiasts are ashamed to admit that they drink the brew...