Word: wagnerians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sung by Licia Albanese and Charles K. L. Davis, Composer Taylor's score, shot through with Debussyan and Wagnerian echoes, still sounded deft, elegant, and admirably welded to the libretto's moods. Except in its ingenious weaving of French folk songs into the dream sequences, the score rarely pretends to be anything other than expert incidental music. But that is enough for Composer-Critic Taylor, who began his career as a piano-roll puncher, vaudeville entertainer and poster artist, is not embarrassed to recall that he narrated Walt Disney's Fantasia, and thinks that U.S. music needs...
Booming Voice. In a career that spanned more than a quarter-century, Tibbett ranged through more than 70 roles. He was never a leading Wagnerian, instead concentrated on the great baritone roles of the Italian repertory: lago in Otello, the elder Germont in Traviata, Scarpia in Tosca, Amonasro in A'ida. For Tibbett the Met scheduled rarely performed operas such as Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, and it was Tibbett, a longtime champion of English-language opera, who created the baritone roles in such contemporary American operas as Deems Taylor's The King's Henchman and Peter...
...clear remove from the world of mortals, Britten wrote the part of Oberon for countertenor (Alfred Deller), a high-pitched, constricted voice never heard in modern opera, and Titania for high soprano (Jennifer Vyvyan). The music of the lovers, on the other hand, was mainly characterized by throbbing, Wagnerian chords while the music for the rustics was simple and zestful-as broadly comic as Shakespeare's own words...
Oddly enough, Soprano Sutherland started out in an entirely different style, hoping to be a Wagnerian singer. The daughter of a Sydney tailor, she took her first voice lessons from her mother, a "nonprofessional mezzo-soprano," won a number of local competitions and with the prize money decamped for London. At Covent Garden auditions, she learned that the Wagner repertory was not for her: "My voice really isn't heavy enough for that, and I soon understood that I'd been forcing it along a road that was wrong...
Between courses of a Wagnerian dinner, Danish-born Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, 69, sounded off on the state of U.S. music: "Do you realize we are the only civilized nation without a ministry of the arts in the Government? Do you think we would have all this juvenile delinquency if our youth were introduced to the fineness of great music and art? Instead we give them criminal entertainment and savage music that builds up in them excitements that they are told they must not release." The Melchior prescription: "I suggest that each state levy a small tax on radio...