Word: wagner
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Neither as chic as Paris nor as intriguingly edgy as Budapest, the Vienna of today is a cozy and polished metropolis. But at the beginning of the 20th century, Vienna was chockablock with giants of the age: Freud and Wittgenstein, Mahler, Berg and Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Hoffmann, Wagner and Loos -- as well as the young Adolf Hitler, a desperate artist-architect manque. Old cultural dogmas had been discredited, new doctrines not yet entrenched. Imminence was all. Artists and intellectuals all over Europe shared a sense of being on the very cusp -- between a smug century...
Until the last decade or so, turn-of-the-century Vienna was neglected by serious historians of architecture and art, considered somewhere between unfashionable and taboo. The architecture of Josef Hoffmann and Otto Wagner and the paintings of Gustav Klimt were camp curiosities at best -- parochial, high-strung, dead-end digressions. Today, however, a kind of Viennese revival is under way. Prominent designers and architects are producing furniture and buildings distinctly reminiscent of Hoffmann, Wagner and Adolf Loos. Every second book jacket, it seems, has a thick, angular sans serif typeface derived from the Wiener Werkstatte, the seminal crafts collaborative...
...most significant architect was an apostate from the older generation. Otto Wagner was, surely, the world's first great modernist. The MOMA show includes a fine display of his masterpiece, the steel-and-glass interior of the Postal Savings Bank (1904-06). It was an architectural space exuberantly of its age, right on the boundary between the classicized past and the industrialized future...
...fourth, of 20th century works, will be released in September.) The assortment of music on this three-record set, released last month, is very odd for a Romantic piano music collection: three sonatinas by Jean Sibelius, an obscure sonata by Richard Strauss, two transcriptions by Gould of highlights from Wagner operas, and more conventional repertoire by Brahms and Grieg...
...Gould's Wagner transcriptions (recorded in 1973), taken from the operas Die Meistersinger and Gotterdammerung, make for fun listening. Gould has added lots of counterpoint to the original orchestral score (in order to play all voices in the Meistersinger Prelude, Gould had to dub one take over another). In Gould's able hands Sibelius's sonatinas (recorded in 1976-7), short, sparsely-written works, receive as good a performance as they are likely ever to have on records...