Word: wagnerities
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NONFICTION: Dorothy Day, William D. Miller ∙ The Killing of Bonnie Garland, Willard Gaylin ∙Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson ∙ Richard and Cosima Wagner: Biography of a Marriage, Geoffrey Skelton ∙Thomas Hardy, Michael Millgate ∙Uncivil Liberties, Calvin Trillin
...fond of 2 Henry IV--indeed I am found of it too-but he should realize that the whole story cannot be presented in one night any more than can Wagner's four-day Ring cycle. The tale takes four plays to tell, but each one is self-sufficient and intelligible by itself Attempts to conflate two or more plays have been only partly successful-as Orson Welles discovered in his 1965 film version, Chimes at Midnight...
...bulwark for both of them against an ungrateful world. Old Liszt swooped down occasionally to inflame Cosima's feelings of guilt. Nietzsche betrayed the cause with attacks on Wagnerian aesthetics. King Ludwig offered ardent support one moment and retreated into incipient madness the next; reports reached the Wagners that he went in and out of his palaces only by the windows and once ordered dinner for twelve, then sat down alone after bowing to the empty seats. Weary and overextended, Wagner toyed with emigrating to the U.S. on the condition that the American faithful would "place at my disposal...
Skelton, the British translator of Cosima Wagner's Diaries, recounts all this with grace and a perhaps too benign indulgence. Since his story leaves off before Cosima's long widowhood (she died in 1930, at 93), he does not have to confront her in the decades when she reigned implacably over Bayreuth. He cites ample evidence of Wagner's more monstrous traits, which Cosima shared or abetted: egomania, antiSemitism, a devouring exploitativeness. Yet Skelton seems to take his tone from a remark of Cosima's, when the abandoned Bülow told her he forgave...
...cooked up by Director Sarah Caldwell, 58, who joined her featured players for a bit of balloonfoolery during rehearsals. Though opera was regularly and hilariously parodied by Caesar and Coca, both profess to find the real thing "kind of scary," in Caesar's words. But not serious. "Wagner is serious. This is not serious...