Word: wagnerian
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...opera every night needs several leading tenors. Tenor Gigli inherited many of his best roles from the late great Enrico Caruso. To succeed Gigli Mr. Gatti has chosen Tenor Tito Schipa, another short, plump Italian, lately of the Chicago Civic Opera.* Also from Chicago will come Frida Leider, great Wagnerian Soprano long coveted by the Metropolitan. Tenor Gustaaf de Loor and Basso-Baritone Ludwig Hofmann will strengthen the German wing. Four new Americans are on the list: Tenor Richard Crooks, Soprano Helen Gleason. Contralto Rose Bampton, Baritone Richard Bonelli. Three operas will be added to the repertoire: Louis Gruenberg...
Died. Johanna Gadski, 59, famed Wagnerian soprano, of a fractured skull received in an automobile crash; in Berlin. German-born, she was brought to the J. S. by Walter Damrosch in 1895 and, though young and inexperienced, was acclaimed by Manhattan. In recent years she toured the U. S. with the German Grand Opera Company, a mediocre organization which her rich young idolizer Geraldine Hall Bangs, Manhattan socialite, subsidized so that Gadski could go on singing in opera. Mrs. Bangs was driving the car which crashed last week with a Berlin trolley. She and Captain Hans Tauscher, Gadski...
Soprano Ljungberg's voice has lovely subtle tones but is not strikingly powerful for a Wagnerian's. It was only a medium-sized voice when on her eighth birthday she sang for the Queen of Sweden, got five crowns because she had "gold in her throat." She spent the five crowns on cakes and milk for her school friends. In Stockholm's singing academy she learned German (she calls it Yarman) and the German operas. She acquired superstitions. The right foot must come out of bed first in the morning, the right stocking go on first. If a costume...
...Manhattan the opera Schwanda der Dudelsackpjeijer (Bagpipe-player) made a Metropolitan Opera audience forget last week how bored it had become with the idea of new operas, few of which survive more than one or two seasons. Not even a middle-aged Wagnerian (Baritone Friedrich Schorr), who endeavored to impersonate swaggering Schwanda by oc- casionally skipping across the stage, seemed to dim the happy effect that Czech Composer Jaromir Weinberger got with his sophisticated scoring of a theme song on life and barnyard noises, a rollicking polka, a noisy, oldtime finale. In Europe Schwanda is the best-selling modern opera...
Tall, imposing as a board chairman of the old school, is Basso Witherspoon. His gallant mustachios have greyed in later years, lost something of the grand sweep which might have enabled him in his Wagnerian days at the Metropolitan Opera (1908-17) to sing such hirsute rôles as Wotan and Hunding (Die Walküre) and Hagen (Die Götterdämmerung) with little extra adornment. Buffalo-born, great-grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Yale graduate (1895), he studied architecture before becoming a famed singer. After leaving the Metropolitan he did Wartime...