Word: wotan
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Derived from a ghastly-lovely medieval ballad (Töres dotter i Vänge), the film tells the story of two sisters, one dark (Gunnel Lindblom) and one fair (Birgitta Pettersson), one serving Wotan and the other Christ, one sunk in nature and the other lost in light. The dark sister hates the fair sister, and one morning, when the two girls ride together through the forest to bring candles to the village church, the dark sister secretly opens the fair sister's bread and slips a toad inside. Then, in the depths of the forest, she turns...
...basic stage set of last week's Ring was an eight-ton, segmented concave disk looking somewhat like a huge radar antenna. In the second and fourth Rheingold scenes it was used intact, tilted toward the audience to suggest the rugged slopes of Wotan's mountain home; in other scenes the disk's movable segments represented a cave...
...never before recorded in full, is Das Rheingold, Wagner's thunder-throated masterpiece, presented by London (3 LPs, mono and stereo) in a superb performance. Conductor Georg Solti leads the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with anvil-stroking power; Kirsten Flagstad sings with serene beauty; and George London's Wotan towers with granitic strength. The majestically rolling accompaniment of the gods' procession to Valhalla is sure to lift almost any listener out of his seat...
...What was wonderful," said Olin Downes of the New York Times, "was the tenderness, the depth and subtlety of her scene with Wotan and the sweeping drama of the ensuing passage with Siegmund." Wrote the World-Telegram & Sun's Robert Bagar: "The lady did herself-as well as Wagner-proud . . . [And] she sprang about with something approaching the graceful...
...cancer; in Farmington, Conn. Hungarian-born son of a Jewish cantor, he first studied law in Vienna eventually joined a barnstorming Wagnerian troupe, and after one season in the U.S., was signed up by the Met. Best-known for his memorable Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger and Wotan in Die Walüre, Baritone Schorr shut himself up for hours before singing a new role, to master every histrionic detail...