Word: wagnerism
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...major event in the history of opera in America has been taking place in Seattle over the past two weeks. The Seattle Opera Company presented the four operas of Wagner's Der Ring der Nibelungen in German within a week. That is the way the Ring is regularly performed at the Wagner Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, but almost never in the U.S. Then the Seattle company spun around and repeated the cycle in English. That bilingual trick is a feat that no other company in the world has equaled...
...Wagner knew exactly what he was doing at Bayreuth. Heard in quick succession, Das Rheingold, Die Walkure and Siegfried have a staggering cumulative effect. By the tune one settles in for the 4½-hour finale, Die Götterdämmerung, the ear reverberates with leitmotivs; and Wagner's gods, earthlings, dwarfs and dragons seem familiar, necessary, among the mind's permanent emotional reference points. One gasps at the death of Siegfried, even if he is the sort who will take a drink from anybody. One worships Brünnhilde as the lover and idealist...
...enough veterans to glue things together. Among them is the stage director, George London, 55, one of the great Wagnerian bass-baritones of the 1950s and '60s. If London has his way, he may start a whole new realistic trend in staging the Ring. After the innovative Wieland Wagner began presenting his grandfather's works as absorbing formal abstractions at Bayreuth in the early 1950s, the imitators began falling into line. Says London: "Soon everyone was in a culdesac, with no place to go. That is when the gimmicks started popping up. In one Ring in Germany...
...hear London's influence on the singers' diction, gestures and all-round Wagnerian style. Where his touch left off, Conductor Henry Holt's picked up. The Vienna-born, Los Angeles-reared Holt, 41, has been the Seattle Opera's music director for nine years. His Wagner may lack Sir Georg Solti's dynamism. But it has warmth, coherence and authority...
Porter does well with Brünnhilde's noble, ardent "Willst du mir Minne schenken" sung to Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. Wagner wrote...