Word: wagnerians
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...early youth, precocious, Munich-born Richard Strauss had written under the influence of Mozart and Brahms. But after about 1885, Strauss's contemporaries called his work "psychopathic music." They railed against the brazen dissonances in his huge, Wagnerian tone poems (Don Quixote, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, etc.), the savage horrors of his operas Salome and Elektra, his general lack of taste in composition. But no one could overlook his genius: his unique gifts as an orchestrator, his penetrating power for illuminating character and for describing anything from the zany antics of Don Quixote to the bestiality...
...stand up, even under the hot sun; he had developed abscesses from sitting on the Hugin's wooden thwarts. The big red-and-white-striped sail had helped; but the crew had worked so hard at the oars that they had worn out the seats of their Wagnerian costumes, borrowed from Copenhagen's Royal Opera Company...
Like a runaway Wagnerian opera, Fountainhead lumbers from crisis to crisis in a hysterical crescendo of muddleheaded talk and stagy pretentiousness. Its final, most brassy explosion: an enormous, foreshortened view of Gary Cooper-presumably a hulking symbol of rugged individualism -straddling the topmost scaffolding of his new skyscraper. Apparently aimed at Communist and other critics of the American way, Fountainhead will provide some of the corniest grist for Soviet propaganda mills that Hollywood has produced in a long time...
...Peter Grimes" was commissioned by the Kousscvitzky Foundation in 1945 and received its first performance under Boris Goldovsky's direction at Tanglewood in 1946. It takes a turn back to pre-Wagnerian opera with recitative and arias. The orchestra is subordinated to action on the state, though, judging by Thursday night's performance, Conductor Emil Cooper must think the opposite. The music is full of the sea--powerful and unsympathetic. It is a fine mood setting for the vicious fishing village, and Grimes' proscription by the other inhabitants is well portrayed. There are several numbers which stand out: the quartet...
...Welitsch had critics reaching back for comparisons to Olive Fremstad, who sang (but did not dance) the U.S. premiere of Salome in 1907. And she carried the rest of the cast into the spirit of the thing with her: even though some of his voice has gone to Valhalla, Wagnerian Tenor Max Lorenz couldn't have been more convincing as the dissolute, incestuous Herod; and Baritone Joel Berglund, as Jokanaan (John the Baptist), had the starkness of a primitive carving as he hurled his curses on Salome. When the curtain was down, instead of morosely reaching for their coats...