Word: wotans
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...nhilde and Wotan without their winged helmets? Siegfried's funeral pyre just a dainty red glow offstage-plus a couple of puffs of smoke from the wings? Oldtimers at Bayreuth paled with shock last week as they watched Richard Wagner's grandsons streamlining grandfather...
...real jolt came with the Ring cycle. When Wotan appeared on another dimmed-down stage in Das Rheingold, the murmur went up: "He has no helmet!" Muttered one oldtimer: "The stage is so dark I can't even see if he has a beard." (He had.) Shock followed shock. Wieland stripped his stages bare, cut down on all warlike gear save for a few essential spears. Siegfried's funeral pyre was left to the imagination. In Götterdämmerung, nobody got to see Valhalla burn: there was only a red glow in the sky, no sign...
...help came from 62-year-old Hungarian-born Baritone Friedrich Schorr, once the famed Wotan and Hans Sachs of the Metropolitan Opera. Ever since he retired from the Met in 1943, Schorr had been itching to "start a Wagnerian tradition right here." When Halasz gave him the chance last July to go to work on Die Meistersinger, Schorr jumped at it. He had to start from scratch with the almost all-American cast, but that was exactly what he wanted...
...that she had laryngitis, would not be able to go on as Brünnhilde. The Met's other Brünnhilde, Astrid Varnay, was not available. Finally, at 4 p.m., someone recalled that the wife of new Viennese Baritone Ferdinand Frantz, who was scheduled to sing Wotan that night, had sung Brünnhilde in Vienna and Munich. Musical Director Max Rudolf picked up the phone and called Madame Frantz (stage name: Helena Braun...
...critical need for one, operatic acting being as internationally stylized as it is. That night the surprised audience saw a new blonde Brünnhilde moving around the stage as though she had been singing at the Met all her life. Said Helena Braun's husband, who as Wotan was on stage with her most of the time: "We watched each other for mistakes but there were none." The critics cheered her acting performance, generally agreed that her voice, if tremolo-ridden, was strong, wide-ranging and well used...