Word: wagnerism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Literacy in Spanish Sir: What an intriguing idea New York's Mayor Wagner has there: to allow Puerto Ricans to take literacy tests in Spanish [Aug. 9]. Why couldn't we have oral literacy tests for people who can't read or write? EUGENE MOORE Lancaster...
...midafternoon almost every day this month, mannerly crowds file into the drab and muggy Festspielhaus in Bayreuth to witness an opera by Rich ard Wagner. It is nearly midnight when they file out again - hungry and exhausted, perhaps, but elevated by a sense of hard cultural accomplishment. The music, as always, has worked its mystic wonders on them, but - except for that band of initiates known as Wagnerites - the drama has left them plagued by the kind of metaphysical confusion that comes from attending services at somebody else's church...
Down on Your Knees. This year is the 150th anniversary of Wagner's birth, and Bayreuth Festival pilgrims whose health can stand it may see, in a single week, the complete Ring (14½ hours), Parsifal (4½ hours), Tristan and Isolde (4 hours) and Die Meistersinger (4½ hours). Among each night's full house are a dozen or so operatic masochists who attend every festival performance every year-an annual dose of 111 hours of straight Wagner swallowed in only 28 days. If this regime is not enough to cure them, there are museums that boast...
...Puerto Ricans has become a major preoccupation of New York politicians. Puerto Ricans already cast enough votes to tip a close citywide election, and probably a lot more of them could vote if they were not disqualified by the state's literacy requirement. Last week Democratic Mayor Robert Wagner proposed a way to get around this inconvenient barrier to bigger Puerto Rican turnouts at the polls. If literacy tests could not be abolished entirely, he said, it was "obviously right" that Puerto Ricans should be allowed to take theirs in Spanish...
What was really obvious, however, was that Wagner was talking like a politician, not like a responsible public official. In the U.S., a literacy test for voters has no meaning whatever unless it is a test of literacy in English. The laws are written in English, the governmental councils deliberate in English, and the newspapers and magazines that have substantial journalistic resources for searching out truth are published in English. Understandably, Wagner's suggestion aroused protests. Huffed the New York Times: "If Spanish-speaking persons are permitted to qualify in that language, what logic would justify denying similar exceptions...