Word: wagnerians
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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BEETHOVEN: AH, PERFIDO! (Philadelphia Orchestra with Kirsten Flagstad; Eugene Ormandy conducting; Victor: 4 parts). Today's No. 1 operatic voice is more perfectly suited to Wagnerian declamation, but the recording engineers have done magnificently...
...last few years. The great voice of Mme. Kirsten Flagstad is perfectly adapted to interpret such roles as Brunnhilde and Isolde; and it is largely to the Norwegian soprano's credit that Wagner has zoomed to the heights of favor in this country. Proof that Boston is still Wagnerian minded is demonstrated by the fact that already the seats for "Tristan," "Parsifal,"and "Lohengrin" are completely sold...
...certainly no one composer should be sung to the exclusion of other writers whose works are of equal merit. Last year, with the entire "Ring" cycle and several individual Wagnerian operas all crowded into ten days, there was a complete lack of balance in the musical fare. That is why Verdi's "Otello," Mozart's "Don Giovanni," and Richard Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier" are such welcome additions to the 1938 Boston list...
What U. S. Wagner fans like about Wagner is the surging music and the epic drama; but they lose themselves only temporarily in the make-believe of the Wagnerian fairyland. But in Adolf Hitler's Aryan Germany, that fairyland goosesteps up and down the streets in brown shirts. If Wagner, in his operas, sets will and strength above mere brains, thereby echoing the philosophy of his contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche, his present-day German disciples have gone him one better. What to him was a theme for art and philosophy is to them a principle of practical politics. Realmleader Hitler...
Last week, while 14 Reichswehr generals were ousted, after protesting among other things Rosenberg's Wagnerian neo-paganism (see p. 18), Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House opened its annual Wagner cycle. Not even in Wagner-worshipping Germany will these operas (Tannhäuser, Die Meistersinger, the Ring cycle), be more reverently, painstakingly and expertly performed. But where the all-conquering Siegfried represents Der Fiihrer to every starry-eyed German backfisch, he will remain for U. S. operagoers a poetic figure of ancient and barbarous legend...