Word: wagnerism
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Last week the battling Berrys left Manhattan for their annual hitch at the Vienna State Opera. Met audiences consoled themselves with the knowledge that the couple will be back on stage next season in a new production of Wagner's Die Walküre, which calls for them to square off and fight it out as a pair of unhappily married gods...
...full five fathoms the treasure lay for the next 250 years. In 1949, a Sebastian, Fla., contractor named Kip Wagner began to collect the blackened silver coins that occasionally washed ashore. None of them, he noted, were dated later than 1715. Wagner began ransacking libraries for data on the 1715 catastrophe. He managed to obtain 3,000 feet of microfilmed documents from Seville archives, found details of the Silver Plate fleet's cargo manifestoes plus testimony from the official investigation of the wreck...
...Ingots. In 1961, Wagner and a syndicate of seven friends, called- Real Eight Co., Inc., took out a salvage search lease with the State of Florida (in return, the state gets 25% of their take). First underwater teams located, with the aid of magnetometers, two wreck sites, marked only by piles of the original ballast stones and cannon (the wood hulls had long since been eaten away). The teams shoved the 50-lb. stones aside and cleared away loose sand with a hydraulic blaster...
Their most spectacular find occurred on May 30, 1965, when the blaster uncovered an area that was, as Wagner put it, "a solid carpet of gold. The coins were lying two and three deep and some were even stacked in piles." All told, in seven summers of diving, the treasure hunters recovered an estimated $3,000,000 worth of jewelry, pottery, artifacts, navigational gear, silver and gold-some of the gold ingots weighing 9 and 10 lbs. apiece. Nor has the gold lost its luster. Last week collectors were happy to pay up to $9,000 for a single gold...
Verdi's Veto. The inevitable revolt against such excesses came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when German composers such as Wagner and Strauss insisted on Werktreue- allegiance to the printed score. At the end f his career, even Verdi was threatening to sue any opera house that permitted singers to change a single note of his music. The castrato vogue gradually faded, and as the size and interpretive importance of the orchestra multiplied, the composer became the dominant figure in opera. "The singer's margin of creative and imaginative freedom was inevitably inhibited," says Pleasants...