Word: wagnerian
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...combo, he settled down to serious composition. His most ambitious work to date: an opera about the Ma Barker mob, which appeals to him because "you need subhuman or superhuman characters in opera" and because he hopes that the role of 220-lb. Ma will "resuscitate the race of Wagnerian sopranos...
...scandal seemed a standard scene from the Wagnerian opera: building inspectors on the take because the Board of Education pays them too little, winks at their peccadilloes, and demoralizes them with the behavior of those higher up. But it struck the public hard; playing with the safety of schoolchildren was more than ordinarily corrupt. Said Theobald, a civil engineer whose academic-political experience as a former president of Queens College and a former deputy mayor should have prepared him for Big Town surprises: "It is quite a jolting experience...
...internally of his mind, externally of nature-hoping to surround and throttle the invisible demon that was both the subject and the object of his writing. His individual images are arresting, but what he did well, he overdid. There are page-long cascades of imagery, torrents of metaphors. The Wagnerian school of U.S. writing-Faulkner, Wolfe, Lowry-has apparently never heard of the pause that refreshes...
Other composers since Wagner have sought to construct a similar classification. Although Ralph Vaughan Williams' Riders to the Sea is undoubtedly a music drama in the Wagnerian sense, it probably derives more directly from Mussorgsky or Debussy (whose Pelleas et Melisande it most closely resembles...
...turn of the century, a 26-year-old song tinkerer in Vienna wrote a gigantic cantata that profoundly impressed an already influential German composer, Richard Strauss. To Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg's Gurrelieder heralded a new flowering of post-Wagnerian romanticism. But the work was, in fact, only a massive monument to a musical tradition about to decay. After it, Schoenberg was to begin the experiments with atonalism that eventually determined the direction of 20th century music. Once popular in Germany, Gurrelieder had its U.S. premiere under Leopold Stokowski in 1932, has rarely been performed since. Last week at Carnegie...