Word: wozzeck
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...most luridly erotic of all opera heroines has yet to appear on any opera stage. Beside her, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mzensk would seem a rural innocent (TIME, Feb. 11). The adulterous Marie in Alban Berg's Wozzeck is a colorless nobody compared with Alban Berg's Lulu, a symbol of insatiability conceived in the tortured mind of Playwright Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist, Die Büchse der Pandora). Sooner or later Lulu is bound to make her operatic appearance because of Composer Berg's reputation, the power of his music. Orchestral excerpts from Lulu have...
...When Wozzeck was given in Philadelphia four winters ago, conventional operagoers shuddered at its dissonances, stamped Composer Alban Berg as a stark ultra-modernist who had little regard for beauty. Wozzeck's story was sordid. Its music was an enigma to many, though none denied its power. For six years in his home in Vienna, Composer Berg has been working on a second opera, Lulu. Boston had the first U. S. taste of it last week when Sergei Koussevitzky conducted five symphonic excerpts...
Lulu's story, hatched in the erotic mind of Playwright Frank Wedekind, is even more lurid than poor bewildered Wozzeck's. Lulu is a vampire who feeds on power and lust. She destroys three men in the first two acts. At the end when she is murdered and horribly mutilated, the orchestra emits one terrifying shriek. Then only did Bostonians sit up in their seats. For although Berg again "uses the twelve-tone scale, he weaves it into a crafty harmonic design, subjects it to his moods which are for the most part restrained...
...phonograph records is only partly true. His first teacher, David Scull Bispham, schooled him for one year before he made his first stage appearance at a Philadelphia benefit show in 1922. He sang for the Savoy Opera Company, Philadelphia's Civic Opera, made his New York debut in Wozzeck in 1931. In the next two years Baritone Eddy's reputation as a concert singer steadily increased. When in 1931 he gave a concert at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium to an audience trained to appreciate manner and appearance as well as vocal qualities, he made a prodigious impression...
...When Stokowski turned operatic and conducted Alban Berg's Wozzeck (TIME, March 30, 1931) a spotlight magnified the shadow of his hands on the theatre's ceiling. *Curtis Bok is no "angel." Hut during his lifetime his father, Edward Bok, gave $239,000 to the Orchestra's Endowment Fund...