Word: wagner
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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While Prime Minister King met with his Cabinet, plump, black-bearded Percival Price, carilloneur of the Parliament Building's peace tower played, with his assistant Robert Donnell, selections from Wagner, favorite composer of Adolf Hitler. They were practicing for this week's Carilloneurs' Congress in Manhattan. At week's end, Prime Minister King emulated Franklin Roosevelt, sent personal peace pleas to A. Hitler, B. Mussolini, I. Moscicki...
...Wagner: Die Walkure, Act 2 (Berlin State Opera and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, Bruno Seidler-Winkler and Bruno Walter conducting, with Lotte Lehmann, Marta Fuchs, Margaret Klose, Lauritz Melchoir and Hans Hotter; Victor: 20 sides). Austria's Anschluss in 1938 interrupted a magnificent recording of Die Walküre in the middle of the second act. Already completed were Sieglinde's scenes, sung by anti-Nazi Lotte Lehmann, conducted by Jew Walter. After Anschluss the rest of the act was filled out by a 100% Nazi cast. Despite this patchwork, the result is good enough to make a Wagnerphile...
...problems was to satisfy the German passion for music and drama without indulging the non-Aryan composers, playwrights and directors who were to a large degree responsible for them. Music was comparatively easy, for Germany's favorite composer is romantic, loud, Aryan Richard Wagner. Every year at Bayreuth the Führer turns up and sits raptly listening to Tristan und Isolde. But Germany's favorite dramatist is an Elizabethan Englishman: William Shakespeare. And Shakespeare's foremost German producer before Adolf Hitler was a Jewish director, Max Reinhardt, whose summer theatre at Salzburg once ranked with Bayreuth...
Maestro Toscanini apparently had become a Lucerne fixture: he rented a chalet on the lake, began building a permanent home there, was made an honorary citizen of the town. Last summer Toscanini saluted another musician who once lived on Lake Lucerne. In Richard Wagner's garden, Toscanini "reconstructed" the first performance of the Siegfried Idyll, which was a serenade to Wagner's mistress and wife-to-be, Cosima...
Less whimsical, but equally sticktuitive are his present clients, who will keep him busy till November. Courier Wagner will then be free to join his wife in London, whence they will repair to Switzerland on their annual winter holiday...