Word: venusberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mountains, it was Wagner who produced the greatest effect upon me. . . . If Wagner is the most difficult mountain to be observed distinctly, not only due to the lyric vapour in which he so often drowns, but also because of his non prehensible morphology, the contours of the Venusberg, one of the last mountains ascended by Wagner, . . . are much more difficult to delimit. . . . You will see Louis II, Venus, Leda, the Swan, Sacher Masoch and his wife, Lola Montez. You will see the Three Graces, with so many graces attached to their anatomies that it is incredible...
...audience was quite willing to believe it. When at long last the curtain rose on Dali's brand-new setting for the Venusberg Bacchanale scene from Wagner's Tannhäuser they saw what they had come for. At the back of the stage, before a punctured mountain on a windswept plain, an ossified swan spread 15-ft. wings. In and out of its ruptured, bony breast the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo's ballerinas climbed like the maggoty stuffing of a decayed Thanksgiving turkey. In the orchestra pit the staid Metropolitan Opera orchestra surged and noodled...
Wagner: Overture, Venusberg Music and Prelude to Act 3 from "Tannhauser" (Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting; Victor: 10 sides). Stokowski at his thunderbolt-hurling best. The Philadelphians noodle magnificently...
...user was the first day's opera. Familiar was the cast: fat Lauritz Melchior sang the title rôle; Soprano Maria Muller of the Metropolitan Opera was an able Elizabeth, but (said a U. S. correspondent) "her impersonation wanted in true virginal tenderness and womanliness." The Venusberg scene did not represent "frenzied eroticism" but "revue calisthenics." Venus (Contralto Anni Helm) was "tender, but in a maternal way." Nevertheless the audience was enthusiastic, applauded (mostly for Toscanini) a full ten minutes...
Wagner's Tannhäuser-Overture and Venusberg Music (Victor, 3 records, $6.50). Called the "Paris Version" because in 1861 Wagner added a bacchanale before taking Tannhäuser to the French capital for the pleasure of Princess Metternich, this is sensuous, stupendous Wagner...