Word: wagnerian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...jacket clogged with enough medals for a NATO division, Wagnerian-size Tenor Lauritz Melchior chatted with Denmark's King Frederik IX at a celebration in Copenhagen of the Royal Guard's 300th anniversary. A guardsman himself in his nimble youth, Melchior crossed the Atlantic for a month's vacation in the old country with a 40-man delegation of Danish-American Guard grads, sang out loud and clear at the parade and at a festive veterans' dinner in the Tivoli Gardens...
...also knew where his genius lay, wisely rejected both the Wagnerian influence and the broader version of the Italian verismo style as practiced by Mascagni and Leoncavallo. Instead, he clung to his own romantic, melodious, bittersweet tales shot through with a uniquely warm lyricism and underscored with lushly singing strings. A painstaking workman who admired clarity ("The black scores," he said, "are the easiest to fake"), he left as his legacy only eleven operas. But 34 years after his death, the world of opera has not found a composer who can speak to the universal audience Puccini commands...
...with Richard Wagner. Before long Friedrich was telling Wagner to his outraged face that he thought Bizet's operas better ("Bizet's music does not sweat," explained Nietzsche). But his dumpy little sister fell hard for the antiSemitic, Valhalla-first rantings that her brother Friedrich dismissed as Wagnerian idiosyncrasies. She took up with a Wagnerian camp follower named Bernhard Forster, who organized Germany's first anti-Jewish mass meetings and rounded up 267,000 signatures for his appeal to Bismarck to register all German Jews and bar them from key jobs. When Nietzsche found out that Forster...
...four years Wagnerian Soprano Kirsten Flagstad has given only charity concerts, insists that she is a ''private person." But her voice is more public than ever-on records. After it became known in 1954 that (with her consent) His Master's Voice sound engineers had called on Soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf to dub in two high Cs that Flagstad was unable to hit in Tristan und Isolde, Flagstad could not be lured before a microphone for nearly two years. But since then she has signed up with London Records, made 23 LPs, including a complete Götter...
...Norwegian Soprano Aase Nordmo-Lövberg, sight unseen. Last week Soprano Lövberg, 34, a statuesque blonde, appeared in Philadelphia's Academy of Music for her American debut. Despite a deep chest cold, she sang a challenging program of arias from Beethoven's Fidelio and Wagnerian selections. Soprano Lövberg proved to be a sort of Flagstad in miniature, more lyric than dramatic, with a round, pure and rangy voice. Said Conductor Ormandy: "One of the greatest singers I've heard anywhere...