Word: wagnerian
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Like a cellar-sitting baseball club looking for a pitcher and a catcher, Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week was in the market for an Isolde and a Brünnhilde. The Met needed a top-notch heavyweight soprano to sing these Wagnerian roles, pinch-hitting for Kirsten Flagstad, now immured in her native Norway until the war ends (TIME, June...
...been Soprano Flagstad and gusty, barrel-built Danish Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. Almost always the pair sold out the house with their hefty love-making in Tristan and Isolde, their caroling and ho-yo-to-ho-ing in the Ring operas. Ordinarily there would be on the Met's Wagnerian bench two sopranos who could take Flagstad's place as Melchior's teammate. But last week it appeared that neither of these would be fully available...
...other Wagnerian soprano is comely Australian Marjorie Lawrence, famed as a Brünnhilde who actually mounts her horse instead of singing apprehensively by its side. Two months ago Soprano Lawrence was vaccinated for smallpox; paralysis developed. In Hot Springs, Ark. last fortnight she sat up for the first time, then was taken to Minneapolis for treatment by famed Australian Nurse Elizabeth Kenny (TIME, June 23). But it may be six months or more before Soprano Lawrence can mount a stage, much less a horse...
...Wagnerian short rations would be more endurable if, as happened during World War I, the public developed an antipathy to German music. Although Richard Wagner is the great Nazi musical and ideological hero, a survey in Variety last week showed that there is no U.S. reaction whatever against German music. Even Canada can take it. Variety reported that Tenor Melchior, in deference to supposed Canadian tastes, lately omitted German numbers from a recital in Montreal. His audience shouted for German encores, got them...
...German airmen feel quite as Wagnerian: "Franz Putzke was in one of his serious moods . . . he wasn't so keen about shooting the people who ran. . . . Lederer said: 'They are our enemies, aren't they? One must kill his enemies, too!' I said, 'Who are we to decide what to do or what not to do? The Führer decides.' Putzke wouldn't agree, and Lederer called him a democratic coward. . . . Of course, Putzke isn't a democratic coward. He's just not interested. Originally he wanted...