Word: wagnerian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...work of Kline's contemporaries--especially, in the '40s, De Kooning, whose influence on Kline was pervasive. A case can be made for Wotan as Kline's masterpiece; that extraordinarily forthright black rectangle, with a stub of the top "girder" sticking out to the right, is an image whose Wagnerian power fits its title. Majestic and a little slangy at the same time, it is one of the most commanding American paintings...
...longer think of myself as some mythical Wagnerian tree with a divine right to a noble purpose in my life. We are all leaves on a tree that grows without reason. And this tree cares nothing for the goals and aspirations of its individual leaves. Our only dignity comes from those leaves around us, the individual leaves who knew us well...
...could capture Catcher in the Rye on film, though one supposes that Frances Coppola or a Michael Cimino could spend a couple dozen million trying. Of course either would give us lot of grass--acres and acres of golden grass--with a Wagnerian soundtrack, but it would still feel so ... phony...
...Indeed, blessed with a first-rate cast, a skilled if not always inspired conductor, and a director with strong dramatic ideas about the piece, it must rank as one of the best stagings in recent memory. Objections may be raised about some of Director Nikolaus Lehnhoff's departures from Wagnerian canon in an otherwise traditionalist view of the work. But there can be no disputing the high quality of the vocalism. Since 1976, there has been a director's Ring (Patrice Chereau's Wagner-as-social-revolution) and a conductor's Ring (Sir Georg Solti's at Bayreuth...
...Mezzo-Soprano Hanna Schwarz in Das Rheingold. A delightful bonus was the Walkure Fricka and Gotterdammerung Waltraute of Vienna-born Mezzo Helga Dernesch, who some years ago was an important Isolde and Brunnhilde. Combining her still considerable power with a riveting dramatic presence, Dernesch gave a lesson in Wagnerian artistry. Conductor Edo de Waart was too often cautious when he should have been impetuous, but he roused himself in Gotterdammerung to deliver a reading of surge and sweep...