Word: wagnerism
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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...
...even with the exquisite degree of scholarship that has been expended on Wagner, he remains the most disputed composer of all the masters. Few deny the immensity of his musical genius (one Italian critic listens to Wagner recordings only while down on his knees). The world's orchestras have been permanently reformed and enriched by his advanced ear for harmony and color. Still, there are those who insist that Wagner's music should be outgrown by 20, like acne, an opinion that seems as eccentric as Wagner's own sham intellectualism. He was everything from eugenicist...
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...