Word: wagnerities
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Kenneth S. Wagner North Braddock...
...Bayreuth Festival, however, can see him as something other than a stalwart. In a brilliant bit of casting against type, the suave, silken Prey has been portraying the cantankerous Beckmesser in Wagner's Die Meistersinger. It may be the first time in history that Beckmesser out-sings his tenor rival in the prize-song contest. "In his letters, Wagner said that Beckmesser should not be too comic," says Prey. "So I said I will sing this music like Schubert's Winterreise. "And he does...
DIED. Waverley Root, 79, prolific Paris-based foreign correspondent and author of compendious books on haute cuisine; of lung disease; in Paris. Despite writing such weighty tomes as his two-volume The Secret History of the War and The Truth about Wagner, Root was savored most for gastronomic texts like The Food of France (1958). Root's cardinal rule for eating in Paris: Follow the taxi drivers...
...honorable antecedents. In the first of the 48 preludes and fugues that make up The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach unfolded a serene meditation in the key of C over a placid, unchanging rhythmic pattern. To set the proper bardic tone for his mythological Ring of the Nibelung operatic saga, Wagner spun the entire Prelude of Das Rheingold from a single E-flat major triad, embellishing a bass note into a torrent of arpeggios to depict the primal nature of the Rhine. Ravel built Bolero around a sinuous, reiterated melody, clad in shifting orchestral colors, which only once lurches briefly away...
...first-act song for six voices, called Circles, has an immediately appealing melody that sticks in the mind as vividly as a Top 40 hit. Later, the music grows longer and denser; by Act III, the piece has become a raging cataract of sound that invokes the spirit of Wagner's Rheingold Prelude: a mighty river at flood tide, frightening in its intensity. The elemental force of his music has made the Baltimore-born Glass perhaps the best-known international exponent of minimalism...