Word: wagnerian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mencken's life is that he was not well taught in music. "Lady music teachers . . . wrecked my technic and debauched my taste." He still likes to pound the piano but, "born with an intense distaste for vocal music ... to this day think of even the most gifted Wagnerian soprano as no more than a blimp fitted with a calliope." As for Karl Czerny, standard nightmare of every child's piano lessons: "So late as 1930, being in Vienna, I visited and desecrated his grave...
...carried a little too far. His wife took pieces of cake and candy to the neighbors, assuring them that such a thing would never happen again. The neighbors allowed themselves to be placated. For Mrs. Melchior is very persuasive. And Lauritz Melchior is the world's No. 1 Wagnerian tenor...
Siegfried et al. In the early 1920s, when the late Enrico Caruso died and Soprano Geraldine Farrar retired, the Metropolitan's Italian opera began to limp downhill. But its Wagnerian opera has goosestepped steadily on. When big, blue-eyed Soprano Kirsten Flagstad joined the company in 1935, Wagnerian opera began to boom, played to the biggest box office the Met has known since Caruso's day. Principal drawing card in the Met's Wagnerian productions was Soprano Flagstad's bosomy personality and earth-mother voice. But she could not have done it all by herself. Supporting...
Heldentenor. Lauritz Melchior is not a natural tenor. Jealous Italians refer to him sniffily as a misplaced baritone. Actually, he is an authentic example of a very rare type of singer: the true Wagnerian Heldentenor (heroic tenor). Most tenors have fairly light voices: their honey-voiced wailing is orchestrated to an accompaniment that will not drown them out. But Wagner had no use for such lightweights: the true Heldentenor must be able to out-boom a phalanx of trombones. Richard Wagner's heroes are strenuous fellows, who would willingly break a blood vessel to get to Walhalla, and Wagner...
...Melchior got his first big chance singing Wagnerian roles at London's Covent Garden, six years later moved on to Bayreuth and Munich, where he was rated one of the finest German-style tenors of the day. One sunny afternoon in 1926 he made his debut at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. That evening, ill-starred Kansas City Soprano Marion Talley made hers. In the storm and shuffle of publicity that attended Soprano Talley's debut, Melchior was practically overlooked. One critic described his acting as "barely more than awkward." But Melchior stayed on. Not long afterward...