Word: wolfgang
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RECORDINGS Elvira, Meet Wolfgang It is impossible to predict where a composer's next record hit will come from, even if the composer is Mozart. A case in point is Deutsche Grammophon's 1965 release of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, played by Hungarian-born Pianist Geza Anda. In three years it had sold a mere 2,000 copies in the U.S. Then a passage from the recording turned up as a recurrent, haunting theme on the sound track of the Swedish film Elvira Madigan, which opened in New York City last October. Deutsche Grammophon slapped...
...WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART IS A DIRTY OLD MAN (Epic). Mozart has acquired a pristine aura of impeccable glory, but, like Abraham Lincoln, he loved dirty jokes and puns-which he enjoyed setting to utterly fastidious music for the eternal amusement of the world's musicologists. Now ordinary fans can snicker along, for this album provides everything from Leek mich am Arsch! Goethe . . . (Kiss My Behind! Goethe . . . ) to Liebes Mandel, wo ist's Bandel? (Lovey-Dovey, Where's My Glovey?). The English translations may be rough, but then so are the sentiments; Norman Luboff directs a crew...
Sole Control. As long as Wieland lived, the new Bayreuth flourished. He was the artistic director; Wolfgang stuck to business management. Mama Winifred stayed away. Wieland's new productions were aimed imaginatively toward new, always controversial, often brilliantly successful dramatic ideals. Instead of the heavily literal, violently brassy, pompous stagings admired by Hitler, in which choral scenes often resembled SS rallies in a Black Forest thicket, Wieland created stark, impressionistic stage pictures with a shaft of light here, a barren rock there. To enhance Bayreuth as a cultural force of worldwide significance, Wieland broke with the old chauvinistic policies...
...Wieland died at 49 last fall (shortly before he was to have made his Metropolitan Opera directorial debut), and now Wolfgang, 47, has assumed sole control over Bayreuth. So far, the results have been taken by many observers as a series of ominous portents. Wolfgang's staging of Lohengrin last month, his first effort since his brother's death, departed markedly from Wieland's stylization and simplification and seemed to echo the old conservatism in stead. The bridal chamber was done up like a Moorish gazebo. Singers were allowed to return to the old style of explicit...
Last Straw. All this inspired Der Spiegel to sound a warning blast about Bayreuth's future. Bad enough, said the article, that Wolfgang's production was cluttered, unimaginative and-worst of all-harmless. In his very staging of Lohengrin, the magazine saw signs of an alleged return to the bad old Nazi days. The presence at rehearsals of Mama Wagner, now 73, was the last straw...