Word: wagnerian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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That comment cut deeply toward the root of the question. Stalin and the force which he controlled could stop, start again, turn, twist, dissemble and maneuver. Stalin & Co. were as far as men could be from the compulsive Wagnerian frenzies that had launched Hitler upon the world and swept him to his doom. Stalin & Co.'s evil and their power were of the mind, not of the emotions. Their calculations were as cold as the Volga in February, as dry as a page of Marx. Stalin & Co. might, in a sense, be mad; but they played excellent chess...
...held out to them by her trained canary, Galli-Curci. The soprano gets in trouble when one of her less celebrated victims unexpectedly dies. Despite its over-cute plot and slapdash style, the tale could count on plenty of readers, since its author was a Met soprano herself, strapping Wagnerian Star Helen Traubel...
...slot machine, a head-lolling infant, a British general or a Freudian psychiatrist just off the plane from Vienna. Caesar's comedy partner is pint-sized Imogene Coca ("No one knows how old she is"), who can switch from a prim Victorian to a stripteaser to a Wagnerian Valkyrie without missing a nuance or a laugh...
...with Flowers. He had two telephone conversations with Wagnerian Soprano Helen Traubel, and gratefully learned that she had changed her mind about quitting the Met (TIME, Feb. 6). Instead, Bing announced, Traubel would sing one Wagnerian cycle next season, Kirsten Flagstad the other. Lily Pons, who is as famed for temperament as for her coloratura, telephoned from a hospital, trilled that she would come by for a chat about her contract as soon as the doctors would let her. Not at all, said Rudi Bing. He dashed off to the hospital himself "with my arms full of flowers...
...Traubel's action seemed "rather hasty and unfriendly." But perhaps there was another reason for it. One of the things Rudi Bing intended to tell the press this week was that Kirsten Flagstad would sing at the Met again next season. If Traubel, who has been singing the Wagnerian Ho-jo-to-hos in Flagstad's place for the past ten years, had guessed it, she might well have decided to "proceed with other plans...