Word: walke
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...does not see with my eyes, hear with my ears, and have my own heart." Which leaves only one man who can meet Karajan's standards for a director of any opera that he conducts: Karajan himself. And so, for the production of Wagner's Die Walküre last week at Salzburg's new Easter Festival, Karajan had no trouble getting both assignments. After all, the creator, financial wizard and guiding spirit of the entire festival was Karajan...
...sellout opening-night crowd of 2,000 agreed that Karajan's confidence in Karajan was justified. Director Karajan swept away the clumping athletics and far-out allegory of most recent Walküres. If what was left was often static staging, it was well coordinated with the music, which Conductor Karajan molded superbly. He toned down the singers' usual tendency to bellow and brought out a fresh quality of refinement through subtly shaded dynamics and sensitively modeled phrases. "Chamber music of the soul," rhapsodized one critic, while others looked ahead to the addition of Das Rheingold next year...
Instead, Karajan, who knows his way around a balance sheet as well as a musical score, plugged his festival into the free-spending electronic media. He recorded and released his version of Walküre before the festival performance, brought in a TV production firm-in which he is a major stockholder-to film the festival for worldwide distribution, and lined up more than 20 radio networks. These tie-ins enabled him to sign such top singers as Jon Vickers and Régine Crespin, and he even persuaded the Berlin senate to let the city's famed Philharmonic...
Like any canny producer, Karajan will also take his success on the road. Next fall, the festival production of Walküre, with Karajan on the podium, will play before American audiences at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera...
...McDonnell's 408-acre, 30-building headquarters and plant. There are no frills amid the tangle of boxlike brick offices, glass-clad research laboratories and steel-walled hangars. Scientists experiment with laser beams and gamma rays in basement rooms so jammed with costly equipment that it is difficult to walk about. Executives often labor in windowless cubbyholes. But there are no audible complaints. McDonnell spends weeks and months scouting out able men, screens them with such painstaking care that he is rarely forced to fire anybody. Though he delves into everything from the wording of a minor press release...