Word: wagnerism
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...Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (Tenor Jon Vickers, Soprano Helga Dernesch, Soprano Christa Ludwig, Baritone Walter Berry, Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan conducting; Angel, 5 LPs, $29.90). What a cast of performers! What a disappointment! Given Karajan's past flair for Wagner, not to mention stalwart Tenor Vickers as Tristan, this could well have been, the stereo statement of Wagner's endless paean to adultery. Instead, it is merely a smooth, workmanlike job, hampered by Dernesch's inability to make Isolde alive enough so that her death is significant. The record is also marred by the cavernous, "first...
...tender as its pastoral moments are, simply does not convey the full might of its subject. What Mendelssohn did know about was order, proportion, logic and joy. He was a better orchestrator than either Schumann or Brahms. In some of his juvenile operas, he experimented with leitmotifs-long before Wagner. His greatest innovations came in the realm of orchestral color-ruddy brass canvases, fragile wood-wind-and-string pastels that give the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, for example, such perpetual freshness and surprise. Today, when such qualities are so rare in our new music, it is foolish...
...auspicious moment in history for the birth of composers. Within a four-year period (1809 to 1813), in addition to Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner and Verdi were born...
...Horst Wagner, 66, an SS member of the German Foreign Office, was allegedly responsible for transporting Jews from occupied countries outside the Third Reich to concentration camps. He was arrested in 1958, but it took German prosecutors nine years to prepare the case for trial. The date was finally set for May 1968, but since then Wagner, who is out on bail, has won one postponement after another by changing attorneys and claiming ill health. Last July he underwent an eye operation three days before his long-delayed trial was to begin...
...GHOST OF WAGNER has rightfully been forced to abdicate his position as supreme arbiter of musical taste. "Compromise" theories on the performance of early music, thinly disguising a rampant romanticism, are no longer acceptable. Increasingly, aesthetic balance in musical performance--appropriate instruments and style of execution for each period and composer and respect for the intrinsic value of the music, rather than the luscious effects which may be superimposed thereupon--is the rule rather than the exception. For Baroque works in particular, such balanced performance requires the skillful proportionment of elements which, to the twentieth-century musical mind, often seem...