Word: wagnerism
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Mayor Robert Wagner, with up-for-re-election-year cheer, had announced the neat trick of balancing this budget with no increase in tax rates and no new taxes...
...Wagner's New York City budget has still another distinction: it is larger than that of any state except New York and California and bigger than the annual budgets of about 90% of the United Nations members, including the United Arab Republic, Norway and Brazil...
...dispel any pious delusions that the Symphony Hall Holy Week program, presented by the Boston Symphony and the two University choruses, was a sacred one. Neither Bruckner's Te Deum, Wagner's Good Friday Spell from Parsifal nor Faure's Requiem limit themselves to liturgical and theological ends. Their Christianity is a useful vehicle for the composers' larger musical or intellectual notions (if indeed the ideas in the Wagner or Faure are really Christian...
...concert opened with an extremely hushed and clean reading of Wagner's Good Friday Spell from Parsifal. The opera is, of course, neither Christian nor religious, but deserves hearing any time. Why then drag it out in Holy Week for "appropriateness"? This bow to the season even caused one Boston critic to express profound shock that the audience broke the "sacred" tone of the concert with applause. Myself, I applauded lustily...
...Wagner's operas are characterized by unendliche Melodie, Vaughan Williams' piece was written in unendliches Rezitativ-- and the closest thing to a leitmotiv is the broken and falling voice of the sea itself. The lines follow the natural intonations of the human voice as closely as possible, breaking only at rare intervals into a supple and more melodic arietta. The orchestration, furthermore, is designed only to emphasize the emotions of the speakers (the violins quaver in apprehension, the oboe sonorously heightens the women's grief...