Word: wagnerians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bayreuth can count on plenty of festival fans. There are still purists who consider Wagnerian opera just brassy, pretentious twaddle about supermen, but they are a musical minority. Bayreuth is much less concerned with defending Wagner's music than with denazifying him-and, if possible, giving an internationalist, pro-democratic profile to the man who called himself "the most German of the Germans...
Five Costumes. Kirsten Flagstad had no serious doubts. The greatest Wagnerian soprano of her generation, she still possesses, at 55, a voice as incomparable as ever. As for the role of Isolde, she has worn out five complete costumes singing it since she first brought Met audiences to their knees...
...Wagnerian mood We're forced to strain a lung And serve the ponderous musical food Of Götterddmmerung...
Bumps & Grinds. There were a few jarring notes. As the operetta's dupe, Eisenstein, Wagnerian Tenor Set Svanholm occasionally staggered like a fugitive from Götterdämmerung. Red-haired Soprano Ljuba (Salome) Welitch sometimes overacted her Rosalinda. Antony Tudor's ballroom ballet was a sour grape. But the singing and acting of the Met's 25-year-old Coloratura Patrice Munsel (as Adele) made up for all of that. Slim, pretty Patrice twice stopped the whole show cold. Her first show-stopping smash, delivered (with the help of new lyrics by Howard Dietz) with...
Timeless Buffoon Durante had a superb foil in the Metropolitan Opera's strapping Wagnerian Soprano, Helen Traubel. From his first baffled exclamation at seeing her in Brünnhilde's armor ("Holy smoke, she's been drafted!"), through a passage from Die Walküre (in which Durante was a voiceless, baffled Siegmund), to his piteous attempts to pin a corsage on her coat of mail, Durante brilliantly played the role of a frustrated longhair...