Word: wagnerism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This company could very easily give us the 30 or 40 performances of nine Wagner operas we used to have every season, and, judging from the attendance at the token performances we get now, people would come to hear them. There is only one reason for the current decline in the popularity of Wagner-Rudolf Bing...
Incidentally, I think most music lovers will agree that the overdriven orchestral excerpts from the operas are by no means Wagner's best work. His greatest genius was not in his wonderful melodies, or his magnificent orchestration, or his stunning orchestral effects, but in the symphonic development of his themes. This cannot be fully appreciated unless the operas are heard in full...
Separate & Unequal. Willis is the U.S.'s highest-paid public school official. His $48,500 salary, indeed, ranks him fourth among all U.S. public officials, after President Kennedy, Governor Rockefeller and New York's Mayor Wagner. Willis is also an exceedingly able administrator who oversees 552,000 pupils, 22,000 teachers and a $300 million annual budget with brisk efficiency. During his ten years in his post, he has recruited 6,000 additional teachers, nearly doubled the salary scale, added enough classrooms to trim the average class from 39 pupils to 32, and eliminated all double-shift instruction...
...even with the exquisite degree of scholarship that has been expended on Wagner, he remains the most disputed composer of all the masters. Few deny the immensity of his musical genius (one Italian critic listens to Wagner recordings only while down on his knees). The world's orchestras have been permanently reformed and enriched by his advanced ear for harmony and color. Still, there are those who insist that Wagner's music should be outgrown by 20, like acne, an opinion that seems as eccentric as Wagner's own sham intellectualism. He was everything from eugenicist...
Merely a Monster. Wagner is, indeed, the only composer in history whose work amounts to an authentic ism; no one ever speaks of "Bachism" or "Mozartism," but Wagnerism has emerged as a way of life more than once, usually with unfortunate results. Ludwig II, the Mad King of Bavaria, was an ardent disciple, but Wagner's most disastrous convert was Hitler, who said that an understanding of Nazi Germany required an understanding of Wagner. Hitler became a vegetarian in imitation of Wagner and liked to think that his SS embodied the spirit of Parsifal's Knights...