Word: wagner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...year. But fashionable places like Cortina d'Ampezzo and Madonna di Campiglio show increases of as much as 22%. Less adventuresome spenders have plenty of high-priced entertainment to choose from. At Milan's La Scala opera house last week, for instance, the season's opener, Wagner's Lohengrin, was sold out at $160 a seat...
This is a time of startling directorial innovations in opera. Patrice Chéreau's controversial Bayreuth staging of Wagner's Ring cycle (1976) featured Rhine maidens frolicking near a hydroelectric dam and Siegfried wearing a dinner jacket. But what Brook has done goes beyond accepted notions of radicalism. Essentially, he has recomposed Bizet's masterpiece, discarding whole sequences, changing the order of arias, even putting the overture near the end. The implicit arrogance of all this does not trouble Brook. "Opera is not a musical contract on paper, something between attorneys," he says. "The whole essence...
...Wagner had become worried about his wife and radioed the harbor master. The call was answered instead by Don Whiting, night manager of the restaurant they had left three hours earlier. Whiting launched a search, and at 3:26, the Coast Guard was called in. Soon after dawn, a guardsman spotted Wood's body a mile down current from the yacht and 200 yds. from shore. The empty dinghy, loaded with lifejackets, was not far away, bobbing in the waves...
Wood's death was touched by sad irony. She and Wagner were married on a boat off Catalina. But for Wood, the good life at sea must have held some menace. "I'm frightened to death of the water," she said in a recent interview. "I can swim a little bit, but I'm afraid of water that is dark...
Early Sunday morning, with the numbed purposefulness of the bereaved, Wagner took a helicopter back to the mainland, rushing ahead of the news to tell his three daughters, the eldest age 17, of their mother's death. Three days later, as a balalaika dirge played, the family and 60 friends buried...