Word: wagnerities
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...Wagner has not fared well at the Metropolitan Opera during the 21-year regime of Rudolf Bing. No fault of Bing's: except for the shining example of Soprano Birgit Nilsson, most singers during that period barely coped with Wagner's long, heroic, leading roles. On the whole, it was left to stage directors and designers to make up in looks what was missing in sound, usually with limited success...
...latest to try. Director August Everding and Designer Giinther Schneider-Siemssen, are no exception. Their new Tristan und Isolde, which opened at the Met last week, undoubtedly will provoke arguments for as long as the production runs. To some, it may be a bold realization of the poetry in Wagner's libretto. To others, it will seem more like the further adventures of Mary Poppins, German style...
Delicatessen Window. Everding has mounted one of those productions in which the actors don't act but the scenery does. Wagner's two lovers live in an emotional realm of their own, encountering calamity only when they have to reconcile ecstasy with reality. Everding has them floating off into their own dreamworld during passionate scenes, returning to earth when other people are around. In a starkly symbolic setting where nothing is real, it might have worked. But in this production, both world and dreamworld look equally realistic. Nothing fuses...
...private after-hours club in Manhattan, where she wheeled a piano around the room and performed light classics for tips that sometimes totaled $150 a night. In response to Papa's pleas that she at least devote herself to grand opera, she signed with the Charles Wagner Opera Co., a provincial touring unit. Opera it was; grand it definitely was not. Beverly soon was riding up to 300 miles between dates in a rickety bus, acquiring stiff joints, bags under the eyes?and a pot of poker winnings. "I once sang 63 consecutive Micaelas in one-night stands of Carmen...
...subtly engaging the mind and the imagination. Director O'Horgan's frenetic Broadway incarnation is rarely any of those things. It is, instead, a frequently breathless and occasionally stupendous son et lumière show, crowded with mechanical contrivances, and a headlong rush of happenings that, as designer Robin Wagner puts it, "overlap like arrows in flight...