Word: wagnerian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With Kirsten Flagstad, Helen Traubel and Lauritz Melchior departed from the Met, Wagnerian opera has gone into one of its periodic U.S. declines. From eight productions (including the four-evening Ring cycle) in 1940-41, the Met's offerings of Wagner now run to only about three productions a season. Meanwhile, Wagner fans keep their ears peeled for heroic-voiced artists to build up the schedule again...
...France's Claude Debussy, Germany's Richard Wagner was "that old poisoner" of the pure wells of music. In the 1890's, fuming at the "grandiloquent hysteria" of the Wagnerian heroes-and calling his predecessor "a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn"-Debussy, singlehanded, set about creating a new anti-Wagnerian style. The result was the only opera he ever finished, Pelléas et Mélisande. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, it had a shadowy, once-upon-a-time plot that actually bore a genteel resemblance to Wagner's Tristan...
Debussy's singers have no arias-they sing as naturally as if speaking-while the orchestra sweeps along in the major role. Unlike Wagner's characters, Debussy's do not bemoan their fates; they simply submit to them. Nor is there any Wagnerian bellowing. Where Tristan shouts "Isolde! Geliebte!" at the top of his lungs, with the orchestra going full out, Pelléas whispers "Je t'aime...
...Wagnerian. In 1882 a young man from Hoboken named Alfred Stieglitz was in Germany studying engineering. In a Berlin shop window he saw a camera, and without hesitation went in and bought it. "Fate," he said later, "took me to that shop." He came to produce the finest body of photos yet made by a single artist. He was an accomplished technician, yet he kept insisting that technique was of minor importance. What mattered to him was art-the creation of "equivalents" for reality...
Evans broke the old man's fanatically artistic spell by taking clear, cold, head-on pictures of ordinary people and things. "After Stieglitz's real work was done," says Realist Evans, "he became a very arty old man and a Wagnerian man if there ever was one-a great old fiddler and lace-maker." Evans' realistic approach has inspired a generation of photographers, among them Margaret Bourke-White, who first made her mark photographing industry, and Dorothea Lange, who photographed California's migratory pea-pickers to show the effects of the Depression. Echoing the early Weegee...