Word: wagnerian
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...became enthusiastic over the possibilities of rainmaking after reading a newspaper story about a new electronic device that was said to have dumped torrents on parched Escondido, Calif. As it turned out, Escondido had received less rainfall than New York−half an inch since July 1. Undaunted, a Wagnerian team flew posthaste to California to investigate the invention...
Wieland Wagner, grandson of the great man, mounted his first Wagnerian revolution when he took over the Bayreuth Festival 14 years ago, sweeping away the antiquated Teutonic gods, winged helmets and papier-mache shields from the ponderous, four-opera Ring cycle in favor of a treatment as stark and simple as Greek tragedy. Last week Bayreuth audiences were witnessing Wieland's second thoughts and second revolution. He had recast the Ring in the latter-day terms of Jung and Freud. "I wanted to show how many archetypic, primordial, age-old and yet permanently renewing elements of mankind are contained...
...Most Wagnerian productions are mounted either in Cecil B. DeMille rococo or, in recent years, Bayreuth Freudian. Last week, for a change, Munich's National Theater opened a new Tristan und Isolde that dispensed almost entirely with theatrical effects, set the most important scenes in near-darkness. Explained Director Rudolf Hartmann: "I wanted this to be a Tristan in which the main interpretation was left to the music." His concern, which would have delighted Richard Wagner, suited the occasion: the 100th anniversary of Tristan's première-also in Munich...
...from which the Nazis borrowed much-each is essential but none is sufficient to explain Nazism. It could not have happened but for two additional qualities that in the past at least have always seemed to be part of the German character. One is romanticism, the antirational worship of Wagnerian life and death of which Nazism represented a cancerous acceleration. The Hitler regime was romantic, even idealistic, in a perverted way; as Heinrich Heine said, "We Germans are idealists even when we hate." The other, and contradictory, quality is an alarming literal-mindedness, which made it possible even for many...
WAGNER: PARSIFAL (Philips; 5 LPs). This first stereo version has top credentials: conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch, an eminent Wagnerian, it was recorded at Bayreuth, where Wagner intended his "sacred dramatic festival" to be performed and where the acoustics are ideal-even, unfortunately, for coughs. Knappertsbusch slowly and hypnotically weaves the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra and Chorus into a rich tapestry of sound against which budding Heldentenor Jess Thomas as Parsifal, Baritone George London as King Amfortas and Soprano Irene Dalis as the tortured Kundry eloquently play out the medieval legend of renunciation and redemption...