Word: wagnerian
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...there is an eminence grise among living American artists, that man is Clyfford Still. The history of abstract expressionism, the movement that did most to coalesce the once frail identity of American art, is unimaginable without his vast Wagnerian canvases. But 15 years have passed since Still quit Manhattan in disgust for a ten-acre farm in Westminster, Md., and during that time his execrations of the "arrogant farce" of the art world-its neuroses, its museums, its critics, and their failure to come to grips with his work-have not ceased to be heard. He is the Coriolanus...
Schoenberg began composing in an atmosphere of fin-de-siecle decadence with the ponderously rich chromatic harmonies of the post-Wagnerian idiom. He matured as a composer at a time when tonality, the structure which had supported music for over 300 years, was finally sinking under the bloated burden of its own chromaticism into an anarchic morass. The ferment which resulted from the destruction of the old order gave rise to Schoenberg's great expressionist compositions like the sextet Verklarte Nacht, which seems to breathe in that decaying, sickeningly rich atmosphere, and Pierrot Lunaire, which for many is the ultimate...
Berio has begun to create a new kind of music-drama, a miniaturized answer to the Wagnerian epics of the last century. His Sequenza V for trombone is really a theater piece which grows out of a musical core. Body movements are a carefully indicated in the score as the notes. There are instructions about standing and sitting, and the position of the instrument as well as the usual grunts and vowel sounds. To add to the effect, the player is expected to wear a clown costume. It is this sense of theater, this reliance on dramatic rather than musical...
...Trend. The Seattle Ring has a predominantly young cast, with just enough veterans to glue things together. Among them is the stage director, George London, 55, one of the great Wagnerian bass-baritones of the 1950s and '60s. If London has his way, he may start a whole new realistic trend in staging the Ring. After the innovative Wieland Wagner began presenting his grandfather's works as absorbing formal abstractions at Bayreuth in the early 1950s, the imitators began falling into line. Says London: "Soon everyone was in a culdesac, with no place to go. That is when...
...German version of the Ring especially, one could see and hear London's influence on the singers' diction, gestures and all-round Wagnerian style. Where his touch left off, Conductor Henry Holt's picked up. The Vienna-born, Los Angeles-reared Holt, 41, has been the Seattle Opera's music director for nine years. His Wagner may lack Sir Georg Solti's dynamism. But it has warmth, coherence and authority...