Word: wagnerism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Strife was no stranger to Richard Wagner. His lifelong battles with critics, rival composers, performers and jealous husbands formed the sonorous core of his own career, and even blared into some of his opera plots. This summer, 84 years after Wagner's death, the storms still rage over the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, that Bavarian operatic Valhalla built by the composer to house definitive performances of his musico-dramatic masterworks...
When the U.S. Army in 1949 turned the theater over to Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner, the composer's grandsons, certain stipulations were part of the deal. One was that the directors should eliminate all Nazi undertones in their mountings of the music dramas. Another, not unrelated, was that British-born Winifred Wagner, widow of the composer's son Siegfried and mother of Wolfgang and Wieland, should abdicate her long-held role as iron-fisted matriarch of Bayreuth's every artistic and managerial move. Winifred had been a high-ranking Nazi, a personal friend and financial supporter...
...marvelous conversations with Eckermann, the elderly Goethe once remarked that the difference between Classicism and Romanticism was the difference between health and disease. He did not live to know the work of the arch Romantic Wagner, who could reflect both: if Tristan suggests illness, Die Meistersinger is a paragon of health. Last night, the latter's Prelude - which more successfully survives detachment from the whole than most of the other Wagner excerpts that turn up in the concert hall - came through with a good deal of its innate robustness and exuberance. In some places the strings were overpowered...
...WAGNER: DIE WALKÜRE, (Deutsche Grammophon; 5 LPs). Despite all of its flames, blood, magic swords and flying goddesses, this crystal-and-velvet score is the most human of Wagner's Ring operas. Conductor Herbert von Karajan's slow, deliberate pace illuminates each stroke of genius in the score, but some listeners will find that he has sacrificed passion for clarity and restrained the anguish that Wagner's wild climaxes can evoke. No matter: Jon Vickers' Siegmund is powerful and Régine Crespin's hotoyohos are properly rousing...
...shoe factory, his job was so lowly that "even the office girls wanted me to address them by their last names." He even worked for 20th Century-Fox, where he sent complimentary tickets for premières to dignitaries. "I now would like to apologize to former Mayor Wagner," said Joe, "whose ticket I gave to my grandmother...