Word: wagnerian
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...date something). Tristan takes to cutting out the hearts of fallen prey to free their spirit and develops a lifelong, mutually unhealthy relationship with a grizzly bear. He never fully escapes the call of the primitive, but at a certain point he does begin carrying on like his Wagnerian namesake, giving himself over to romantic brooding, hopeless love, careless violence and long sea voyages...
...called a Gesamtkunstwerk -- an all- encompassing work of art -- that would meld music, poetry, drama, dance and stagecraft into one unified, glorious spectacle. The Minimalist composer Philip Glass, 57, has been inviting comparison with Wagner ever since the 1976 debut of his four-hour epic Einstein on the Beach, Wagnerian in length and scope if not in idiom; and the Wagnerian ideal has been evident in much of his later work as well -- in Hydrogen Jukebox's marriage of Minimalism to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg (1990), and in 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof (1988), which combined David Henry...
...helped found 30 years ago, continues to work at a furious pace, sometimes turning out one new opera a year, and he runs the risk of repeating himself. La Belle, though, is remarkable not only in conception but also in execution, brimming with freshets of melody and surging with Wagnerian power in conjuring up a magic kingdom...
...greatest casualty is soprano Deborah Polaski, playing Brunnhilde, especially in Die Walkure. Tall, handsome, heroic in gesture and carriage, she should make an ideal goddess. But with her bulky breastplate and helmet and huge skirt, she looks like the typical porky Wagnerian. The Rhinemaidens are decked out in biker gear, the dwarf Alberich wears one bright green sneaker. A reference to the Green movement? Who knows...
...wise men who hover over her career, like Barenboim and Levine, hope she sticks to her resolve. The fact is that, lovely as her voice is, it is not large. But 26 is very young. It is nearly impossible to predict how a voice will develop; the supreme Wagnerian Kirsten Flagstad sang operetta in her 20s. "You must never force," Bartoli insists. "The test is after the concert: Is the voice still fresh so that you could go on and on?" She certainly passed the test with Levine. When she auditioned for him, he let the session...