Word: wagnerians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Metropolitan Opera's Helen Traubel sounded a Wagnerian note for her home town when she announced that she had bought into the St> Louis Browns, perennial sad sacks of the American League. The deal was no gamble, said she: "I know they are going to do something . . . This is an investment in faith and in sentiment...
...Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. So were the French, with Carmen and Faust, and the Italians, with Aida, La Boheme, Tosca, La Traviata. There was only one cloud in an otherwise sunny sky, but that one was a thunderhead: Wagner. Last week, with the help of an old Wagnerian, Halasz dissipated...
...help came from 62-year-old Hungarian-born Baritone Friedrich Schorr, once the famed Wotan and Hans Sachs of the Metropolitan Opera. Ever since he retired from the Met in 1943, Schorr had been itching to "start a Wagnerian tradition right here." When Halasz gave him the chance last July to go to work on Die Meistersinger, Schorr jumped at it. He had to start from scratch with the almost all-American cast, but that was exactly what he wanted...
...first three days Schorr, now head of the vocal department of the Manhattan School of Music, "just talked" to his City Opera "kids." He saw no reason to do Meistersinger "the way we did it 30 years ago." But he wanted them to understand the true (non-Wagnerian) history of the 16th Century German guilds so they would know what they were singing about. Then he went to work on German diction. When he got down to the fine points of acting, his final advice was simple: "Be yourself. Act as naturally as possible and you are the best actor...
...rushed in two days late, hurried through two piano rehearsals and one with orchestra. He was not worried about his own role of Tristan-although he had found Wagnerian themes "strange for the Latin ear." He had helped himself to memorize his role by sleeping with the speaker of a cerebrograph (automatic record player) under his pillow to embed the music in his subconscious. But, not knowing German itself, he expected to have a dreadful time following the other singers and catching his cues. Flagstad ("She was always there prompting me or giving me a signal with her eyes") took...