Word: wagnerian
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Lily Pons drank from a nursing bottle, Rosa Ponselle rode a bicycle, big Lauritz Melchior, forgetting he was the world's greatest Wagnerian tenor, dressed up like Salome with painted toenails. Because the Metropolitan Opera Company is again desperately hard up it was giving its third Opera Surprise Party. New Yorkers paid $14,000 and laughed three hours to see the expensive singers without wigs or dignity...
Like the sybaritic Ludwig who ruled Bavaria 50 years ago, Adolf Hitler has a fanatic admiration for the operas of Richard Wagner. King Ludwig liked to think of himself as Lohengrin or Parsifal, fixed up his castles with Wagnerian stage settings, helped finance Bayreuth when Wagner wanted a theatre of his own. Last week Dictator Hitler also took Bayreuth under his wing, had the German Government grant it an annual subsidy of 100,000 marks...
...follow, the expert Wagnerian performers who saved the past season from out & out disaster will repeat their acts. Paunchy Tenor Paul Althouse, who made a Metropolitan debut 20 years ago before he was artistically mature, will rejoin the company. Last week as soon as another season was assured, Cyrena Van Gordon, onetime Chicago Opera contralto, was engaged for the Metropolitan. So was Baritone John Charles Thomas, the Pennsylvania Methodist Minister's son who after an apprenticeship in musical comedy Maytime, Apple Blossoms) has developed one of the smoothest baritone voices...
...ardor to build up one of the Wagnerian crescendos Conductor Stokowski twisted a dial off his control desk. In a speech after the demonstration he prophesied a day when "there will be music in small-town auditoriums as splendid as that which is now played by fine symphony orchestras in large cities. ... I can imagine spacious gardens of pleasure in which happy idlers, after a brief day's work, wander amid the trees while they listen to the strains of great music played in some distant music tower...
...last week Adolf Hitler, who dotes on Wagnerian music and surrounds himself with portraits and busts of Bismarck and Frederick the Great, had set forth nothing which could be called a program of what his Government intends to do for and with Germany. From now until April Fool's Day (on which the new Reichstag will convene) Chancellor Hitler intends to rule virtually as a dictator. According to Nazi henchmen, the Reichstag will transact only two pieces of business: it will give Germany a new national flag, will then "adjourn indefinitely...