Word: wagnerism
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Last year, after New York's Mayor Robert Wagner won re-election on a beat-the-bosses platform, it was generally assumed that Wagner would take over as the state's Democratic boss-and be persuaded to run against Rocky. But Wagner hardly has the temperament of a boss; and he soon made it plain that he wanted no part of Rocky this year. The result: a vacuum of leadership within the New York Democratic Party...
Into that vacuum stepped Louis Harris, pet political pollster both to Jack Kennedy and to Wagner. Harris, who considers himself less a vote sampler than a political analyst, soon got to analyzing...
Today, the tale of Tristan's illicit love affair with Isolde, bride of his uncle, King Marke, and of the lovers deaths-Tristan from a dueling wound and Isolde from grief-no longer packs the emotional wallop it had for Wagner's generation. Indifferently played, the familiar music sometimes has an almost soporific effect. But at the Bayreuth Festival last week, audiences responded to a stunning new Tristan und Isolde that gave Wagner's paean to love some of the shock value it must have had when its composer trembled for his hearers' sanity...
Looming Symbol. The composer's grandson, Wieland Wagner, had staged a new Tristan at Bayreuth in 1952, and Brother Wolfgang tried his hand at it in 1957, but neither version satisfied Wieland. As he planned the opera in this year's production, it became "yet another aspect of the ancient Oedipus drama, with its eternal correlation between Love and Hate, Death and Eternity, Father and Son." The most startling changes in Wieland's Tristan: 1) Isolde does not die at the final curtain, and 2) King Marke strangely becomes Tristan's father instead of his uncle...
Death & Transfiguration. How did Wieland justify his changes? "If you read the original score," says he, "you will see that Richard Wagner never mentions Isolde's death, but always speaks about her Verärung (transfiguration). Death for Richard Wagner was never mere loss of life...