Word: valhalla
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Soprano Welitsch had critics reaching back for comparisons to Olive Fremstad, who sang (but did not dance) the U.S. premiere of Salome in 1907. And she carried the rest of the cast into the spirit of the thing with her: even though some of his voice has gone to Valhalla, Wagnerian Tenor Max Lorenz couldn't have been more convincing as the dissolute, incestuous Herod; and Baritone Joel Berglund, as Jokanaan (John the Baptist), had the starkness of a primitive carving as he hurled his curses on Salome. When the curtain was down, instead of morosely reaching for their...
...stage, the beefy Wagnerian gods of Gotterdämmerung snorted and bellowed in their Valhalla. In the wings, a huge Siegfried, mounted on a ladder, sagged his 230 Ibs. down onto waiting shoulders to be borne on stage. "I'm getting too fat for this," grumbled hefty Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. A warrior-god charged into musty corners, looking for his sword; bored spear carriers fumbled through a prop basket full of hunting horns. Behind the backdrop a ragged army of stagehands lounged on the rocks of the Rhine (out of use for the moment), gulping coffee from paper cartons...
Though no one in the red plush seats out front knew it, there was also hammering, hurrying and rehearsing going on all over the block-square Metropolitan Opera House. High above Valhalla, craning for an occasional amused glance at the tiny gods on stage below, painters swashed away at new scenery of an English fishing village. In rehearsal rooms, catacombed through the six-story building, singers agonized over the strange notes of a new score. On a rooftop stage, conductors and stage directors exhorted another cast fully as large and glamorous as the one before the audience...
Those poor souls whose work-a-day lives are punctuated by the pipe-dream of a home in Pennsylvania's Bucks County are due for a rude awakening. Long fabled as the city dweller's Valhalla, a land inhabited by glittering artistic folk and their swimming pools, ol debbil Bucks County squirms evilly under the pen of master funnyman S. J. Perelman. In this newest offering, Mr. Perelman has created a sometimes hilarious expose of a plague spot overgrown with Japanese beetles and a gigantic land crab often called "the rustic...
Lines around the Square reached peak length at mid-afternoon, when 250 students formed a grand march that wound from the back of the Coop into the street, and then up two flights of stairs until it reached the Valhalla of the second floor book stalls. Book-seekers waited 2 1/2 hours...