Word: wagnerism
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...Wagner: Parsifal (Tenor Peter Hofmann, Bass-Baritone José van Dam, Mezzo Dunja Vejzovic, Bass-Baritone Siegmund Nimsgern, Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and Deutsche Oper Berlin Chorus; Deutsche Grammophon, five records). Wagner's last and most difficult music drama has not had a really satisfying recording-until now. Hofmann makes Parsifal both strong and guileless, the splendid Van Dam is an anguished Amfortas, and Nimsgern is an evil, but not inhuman Klingsor. Only Vejzovic, a screechy Kundry, is weak. The real stars are Karajan and his Berliners, who capture the score's glowing spirituality...
...when he lamented that he had "hardly a warm personal enemy left." Naturally, such violence is not for everyone. It takes a person of extremely bad temper, a truly unredeemable sourpuss, to feel comfortable with insults, to take deep pleasure in things like Mark Twain's observation that Wagner's music is better than it sounds, for example, or in Ben Franklin's letter to a new-found adversary...
...playoff plan was altered so that if a club won both halves, the second playoff spot would go to the team with the second best record during the second season. Thus each team would have to win games, not lose them, against every opponent. Cincinnati Reds President Dick Wagner called the solution a "whitewash," an understandable complaint since Kuhn had effectively nullified 35 Reds' victories in the first half. Equally outraged were the Baltimore Orioles, who conceivably could finish with the best overall record in all of baseball and still miss the playoffs. Orioles' Owner Edward Bennett Williams...
DIED. Karl Böhm, 86, august Austrian conductor celebrated for his lucid, authoritative interpretations, especially of Mozart, Wagner and his friend Richard Strauss; of a stroke; in Salzburg, Austria. Despite the international scope of his appearances and recordings, Bohm remained most closely associated with three great native institutions: the Vienna State Opera (at which he served two stints as director), the Salzburg Music Festival and the Vienna Philharmonic. A stickler for detail who shunned showmanship for clarity and fidelity to the score, he once said: "I bring to conducting my own enthusiasm for the music-and then there...
...drawing-room soapboxer - but what a magical box and what an enchanting drawing room! Here, he conducts words as if they were grace notes from Mozart or thunderclaps from Wagner. He leads the dance of ideas as if it were a minuet of the mind. He deploys conflicting personalities like a field marshal and has them lob paradoxes at each other as if they were hand grenades...