Word: wagnerism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...manager, treasurer, director and conductor of the ten-day Easter Music Festival at Salzburg, Herbert von Karajan, 59, takes on the most exhausting one-man musical spectacular since Richard Wagner ran Bayreuth. For the past month, however, the Austrian-born maestro has been flat on his back in hospitals in Munich and Paris, suffering first from flu, which developed into double pneumonia, and more recently from painful and incapacitating nerve inflammations in both legs. Though Von Karajan's recuperative powers are supposed to be second only to those of Lazarus, even his doctors are wondering whether he will...
...that there's much any conductor can do with Carmen, Bizet. for some perverse reason presumably connected with his nationality, insisted on writing French opera at a time when Wagner and Verdi had conclusively proved that the promise of great opera lay elsewhere. Blind to their examples, Bizet wrote six or seven good numbers which have since become standards and filled out the rest of Carmen with tedium and theft. The Second Act quintet is bad imitation Mozart, the Third Act trio bad imitation Rossini, and Micaela's Air good imitation Meverbeer, which is just as bad. Carmen proves Bizet...
...would voice only at the risk of being laughed out of the league of sophisticated pundits. "They spent it dying," continued Levin, "so that you can go on watching television, reading books and helping the children with their homework, and so that I can go on listening to Wagner. I don't know about you, but I am grateful and will now say why." As Levin saw it, the confrontation in Viet Nam may be "confused and horrible, its aims blurred, its cost in innocent blood unaccountable. But if it is lost, if the Americans finally get tired...
Hysterical Herons. "The trouble with most of today's conductors," says Swarowsky, "is that they are not sure of style. A Dürer is not a Rembrandt; a Bruckner symphony is not a Wagner opera. Each style needs its own realization." To sharpen his students' sense of style, Swarowsky suppresses their personalities, dismisses their interpretive urges as mere dilettantism. He leads them through rigorous analyses of scores. "You learn," recalls Mehta, "what the composer is doing and why, and how he entered the composition-through the back door, as it were. We never heard in Swarowsky...
...basis of Nielsen's tensile construction, though, is the struggle between various keys within the same piece, a device that he carried to its logical limit while composers from Wagner to Schoenberg were melting down traditional notions of specific keys. The first movement of his Symphony No. 6 achieves a tragic effect by trying vainly to return to the idyllic G major from which it starts; it succeeds only in reaching the neighboring keys above and below...