Word: wagnerian
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...cast of every German movie comedy. (Another memory feat: ability to give by heart names and descriptions of all U. S., British warships.) Favorite cinema repeaters now are the U. S. films Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Viva Villa! He likes variety shows and his old preference for Wagnerian operas seems to have given way to light operas such as The Merry Widow...
...concerts. Templeton, born an Englishman and blind from birth, is a true artist both in the field of classics and that of musical satire. If you have ever heard him play Chopin and then go on to imitate "an afternoon in a conservatory" with sundry whiskey basses, off-key Wagnerian sopranos, and amazing musical parodies from the piano, you will recognize what unusual talent the man possesses...
Though it is miles this side of Ultima Thule, her newest book, The Young Cosima, will have allowances made for it. Reason: it concerns the most fantastic romance of the most fantastically romantic of composers, Richard Wagner. Wagnerian freshmen who think the Tarnhelm* was something to steer a boat with will take to the book no less than initiates, for the triangle has a dependable literary as well as musical tinkle. In this case: a great man wanting sympathy, a young man wanting love, an intensely ambitious young woman no more capable of love than a piano stool...
Finest opera to be heard at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House today is Wagner opera. And the most important and painstaking of its Wagnerian productions are those of the two Nibelungen Ring cycles which attract some 8,000 listeners annually. No light-headed cafe socialites are they. Wagner's Nibelungen epic consists of four ponderous operas (Rheingold, Walkure, Siegfried, Gotterdammerung) totaling 14 hours of music & drama, requires tremendous listening endurance. But for eight years every Metropolitan Ring cycle has been sung to a sold-out house. Last week the first of this year's cycles opened...
...Pianist Templeton moved on to Manhattan. Manhattanites liked his improvisations on any theme that was tossed up to him. His musical satires* floored them completely. Stoop-shouldered, solemn Templeton would sit at the piano and reproduce the sound of a whole Wagnerian opera, pounding out brass chords, yodeling out-of-tune soprano arias and throaty German tenor recitatives. From Wagnerian opera he would turn to Italian opera, lieder singing, Gilbert & Sullivan, the bedlam inside a music conservatory. Last week Pianist Templeton brought his improvisations and caricatures to Carnegie Hall, where they formed the dessert of a program of more conventional...