Word: whole
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...very poorly on first downs, and that dictates how you play the whole series...
Each of the four operas takes less than an hour, and the whole evening adds up to about four hours in all--less than any one of the original operas except the "prologue" Das Rheingold. Sellars handles the musical cuts as skillfully as possible, and except for some of the act endings in Die Walkure and Siegfried, which he uncomfortably splices straight into the next scenes, they are not unsettling. Of course, Wagner's meticulous structure of leitmotifs crumbles to the ground. But from the opening of Rheingold, when Sellars' voice and the rustle of silver paper (standing...
...Rheingold, wringing it of every bit of spectacle--including towering potato-sack giants. Die Walkure, the best of the four adaptations, flows well musically; Sellars cuts out nearly the entire second act. Though that act, with a 25-minute monologue from Wotan, is the ideological lynchpin of the whole cycle, it rightly is the first to go in a conception of the Ring as entertainment. Walkure also benefits from the absence of Sellars' sometimes-intrusive narration. The presentation races through Siegfried, barely pausing for Siegfried to slaughter a garbage-bag Fafner, and into Gotterdammerung...
...enterprise this huge, of course, there will be misses as well as hits, and Sellars has his share. Particularly in Gotterdammerung--where many critics say Wagner's inspiration failed him--Sellars falters too. Splicing in whole minutes of Kurt Weill music to back up the leather-jacketed, bar-stool Gibichungs may be a justified comment on their theatrical value in Wagner's original scheme. It also, however, shatters with an axe-stroke of cynicism the mood of benign humor that prevails until them. The musical effect is appalling, the lapse in taste alarming...
...satellite-frequency overcrowding worries radio astronomers. "You can't get away from a satellite," Moran said. "A satellite can blast a whole hemisphere and block frequencies essential to radio astronomy," he said. The search for signals of extraterrestrial life and the study of newly formed stars are areas particularly vulnerable to such interference, he said...