Word: wagnerians
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WAGNER: DIE WALKURE (5 LPs; London). Following close upon last year's triumphant Gotterdammerung, London completes its new recordings of the complete Ring cycle with a wonderful Walkure. Conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti again heaps high all the sumptuous glories of the Wagnerian orchestra, at the same time charging every passage of Wotan's family fracas with drama. The lush and beautiful singing is alive with emotion, the stars being an international assemblage of accomplished artists: Birgit Nilsson as Briinnhilde, Regine Crespin as Sieglinde, Christa Ludwig as Fricka, and Hans Hotter as Wotan. Not quite so great...
...stood in the dead center of a musical vortex and managed to conduct both himself and opera with admirable skill. Dragging opera by the scruff of the neck into modern times, demanding improvements in production techniques and performance quality, Bing has helped the art to achieve the Wagnerian ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk, the amalgamation of drama, singing, acting and dancing into total theater...
...unity with Nature?" The Dionysiac escape is a far cry from democracy, one obvious alternative to fascism. Its closeness to nature and opposition to organized civilization are, in fact, as integral components of Nazism as the military order of Pentheus. The Dionysiac cult is the ancestor of the same Wagnerian heritage that gave illegitimate birth to Hitler. For while fascism may in practice defy the wandering, uncivilized Wagnerian prototype, it derives from it nonetheless...
...finitely touched," De Gaulle began. "I bring you the greetings of the Parisian people and the people of France." Then, in perfectly polished Russian: "Long live Moscow! Long live Russia! Long live friendship between France and Russia!" At that cry, the lowering summer skies of Moscow burst with a Wagnerian thunderclap, lightning bolts crackled among the onion domes of the Kremlin, and the rain came streaming down...
...from Britain, packed away from the blitz with her actress mother and sent to study drama in New York. She was, she says, "16, going on 95" when she got her first job-as a nightclub singer and impressionist in Canada. "I did Bea Lillie, Gracie Fields and a Wagnerian opera singer," she recalls. "I wasn't awfully good." True, but her nightclub spot earned enough money to pay her passage to Hollywood, and it was there, at 17, that she got her first movie role, and there that casting directors decided that Angela Lansbury was the girl...