Word: wolfgang
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Since Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner began redraping Grandfather Richard's operas in modern scenic dress seven years ago, première audiences at the Bayreuth Festival have usually focused more on the props than the performance. But last week at the festival's curtain raiser-a new Wolfgang Wagner production of Tristan und Isolde-all ears were sharply tuned to the sounds coming out of the concealed orchestra pit. There Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, at 34 perhaps the most gifted German conductor to emerge since Herbert von Karajan and the youngest ever to conduct at Bayreuth, was making...
...occasion: Florence's Maggio Musicale. In charge: eccentric, peripatetic Conductor Artur Rodzinski (born a Pole in Yugoslavia, he is a longtime U.S. citizen, now lives in Italy). Among leading singers: Swedish Soprano Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Cleveland's Mezzo-Soprano Grace Hoffman as Brangane, German Heldentenor Wolfgang Windgassen as Tristan...
...Wonderville Susan met droll, cantankerous Mr. Pegasus, whose elaborate Cartoon-a-Machine grunted out a canned Terrytoon. In the Foolish Forest she met an all-animal orchestra which included Wolfgang, the violin-playing bear, flop-eared Gregory, the rabbit flutist, and Bruce, the world's only drum-beating gopher-all ingeniously manipulated by wires backstage. Pegasus baited the conductor, Caesar P. Penguin: "He's the world's worst orchestra leader." Said Caesar: "This is not kind. In fact I am going to take umbrage; sometimes I have a headache and I take umbrage." While Caesar took umbrage...
Born. To Irmgard Seefried, 36, bouncy leading soprano of the Vienna State Opera, who has made four U.S. tours, stirred Metropolitan Opera audiences as Susanna in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in 1953. and Wolfgang Schneiderhan. 38, violin virtuoso: their second daughter, second child; in Vienna. Name: Monika. Weight...
...Ponte was not only a fop but a flop. As Poet to the Imperial Theaters in Vienna, it was his duty to write librettos for "great composers," but Da Ponte had muffed the job. In 1785 he decided to collaborate with "an almost unknown, second-rate composer" named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Joseph II was shocked by such folly, but eventually, the amiable Emperor gave his approval. The new opera was Le Nozze di Figaro. So began the greatest collaboration in operatic history. To this day, says British Biographer April FitzLyon, nobody quite knows why "the facile, mediocre poet, the very...