Word: wagnerism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...What Is a Melody? - Second Philharmonic Young People's Concert (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Leonard Bernstein and the N.Y. Philharmonic explore melodies through Wagner, Mozart, Hindemith and Brahms...
...that had killed Isolde on a hundred nights at the opera. The great Wagnerian voice had risen, had touched all the heroic notes, had softened, had faded, had died. For 20 years she was the world's greatest soprano and for nearly 40 it was hard to imagine Wagner without her. Then, last week, at 67, after a bedridden year, Kirsten Flagstad died...
...grown into immense power and clarity, perfectly even throughout its great range. She had grown with it, and when, as Isolde, she embraced Lauritz Melchior's Tristan, 400 pounds of lovebird sang from the stage. But together they were 400 pounds of genius, too, and after them Wagner could never again be the same...
...banging out a succession of grinding dissonances as he attempted to imitate the sound of buses rumbling over the cobblestones of the Faubourg Poissoniere. But more important than the technique was the reticence that he restored to concert halls long accustomed to the thunders and tempests of Beethoven and Wagner. No composer spoke with more intense feeling than Debussy-or in a quieter voice...
Although he felt the pull to Wagner and made ritualistic pilgrimages to Bayreuth, Debussy could not accept ever Wagner without a sneer. Commenting on the characters in Parsifal, he called Amfortas "that melancholy knight of the Grail, who whines like a shopgirl and whimpers like a baby." Yet traces of the Wagnerian influence remained. "But that's the whole of Parsifal,'' muttered Richard Strauss after hearing a particular passage from Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande...