Word: valhalla
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...lifelong battles with critics, rival composers, performers and jealous husbands formed the sonorous core of his own career, and even blared into some of his opera plots. This summer, 84 years after Wagner's death, the storms still rage over the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, that Bavarian operatic Valhalla built by the composer to house definitive performances of his musico-dramatic masterworks...
Each Sunday night from 7:30 on, in the vast Los Angeles metropolitan area, the TV screen is an electronic Valhalla in which Ben Cartwright grapples with the Smothers brothers, Walt Disney with Perry Mason. For millions of viewers, the keenest new prime-time contender is a show-biz nonentity. Nevertheless, as star of the Sam Yorty Show, the mayor of Los Angeles, at 5 ft. 9 in., is a jolly big giant...
Thus, as Wieland interpreted the Ring cycle, Valhalla would be Wall Street, the heroes Siegfried and Siegmund self-sacrificing astronauts, the temptress Gutrune a mythological call girl, the god Wotan a wheeler-dealer politician, his wife Fricka everybody's nagging mother-in-law, and the spear-carrying Valkyries teen-age Beatle fans. Richard Wagner would have adored it, insisted Wieland. After all, no one despised the old Wagnerite purists more than Grandfather, who delighted in shocking admiring visitors by greeting them at the door on all fours and yapping like a fox terrier...
SONGS OF SCANDINAVIA (London). Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish farmer's daughter, puts aside the superhuman passions of Wagner's Valhalla to sing most expressively some quiet love songs and mystic reveries about the fir forests, mists and dripping rocks of Scandinavia. Seven songs are by Sibelius, three by Grieg, and four by the little-known Swedish songwriter and symphonist, Ture Rangstr...
...distinct personality, a warmth. Dependable, forgiving, attentive, gracious and benevolent." What sounds like a paraphrase of the Boy Scout oath is the authors' sentimental tribute to an airplane, the DC-3, the twin-engine, 190 m.p.h. prop-driven craft that first flew 30 years ago and has entered Valhalla under its own power. Of the 10,000 built from 1936 to 1946, some 5,000 are still in the air, faithfully serving 174 airlines in 70 countries. In the heart of the jet age, the DC-3 still accounts for nearly one-third of the world...