Word: graf
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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This small, jolly opera might well get lost in the majestic spaces of the Met. But Viennese-born Stage Director Herbert Graf and Rumanian Scene Designer Jonel Jorgulesco, besides framing the production with its own curtain, brought the four brightly-colored sets as far down stage as possible. Ladislas Czettel designed gay costumes to match Lily Pons's, which was run up by famed, high-priced Dressmaker Valentina. To the military in the original libretto Director Graf added 24 high-stepping vivandieres, explaining: "You cannot think of a regiment with Lily Pons in it without having more female soldiers...
...Carnarvon Castle, hit 22 times, with seven dead, 24 wounded and one hole so near her water line that ballast had to be shifted to make her list away from it, plowed into Montevideo, just ten days before the anniversary of the sinking of the Graf Spee. On the way in she passed a British battle squadron in hot pursuit of the Nazi...
...Best music continuities: The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street, the John Kirby Show. Best newscasters: Major George Fielding Eliot, Elmer Davis, Edward R. Murrow, William L. Shirer, Wythe Williams and Raymond Gram Swing. Best spot reporting: James Bowen's description of the scuttling of the Admiral Graf Spee. Best sports report: Ted Husing on The Belmont Stakes...
Young Oskar Graf was neither peasant like his mother nor petty merchant like his father. So he ran away from home to the arty and radical circles of Munich's Bohemia, where "nothing was so taboo as sentimentality," where anarchism, drunkenness and futurism foretold coming decades of disintegration. They came: the World War, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, inflation, hunger, humiliation, the Nazis. Oskar Graf thought more & more of his mother. He identified her with the masses, "the blameless German people . . . already behind the plow, in the workshops, factories, and offices, working as hard as ever, without particularly concerning themselves...
Then exiled Oskar Graf went to the U. S. S. R., where he found "incomparable social institutions . . . almost like a fairy tale." But the primitive, polyglot city of Tiflis again reminded him of his mother. "Napoleon wasn't worth anything, and Hitler certainly isn't. They think they change the world, but in the last analysis everything remains as it was. . . . The human instinct for self-preservation is tough and ineradicable. Its patient, long-suffering force seems to keep pace with any historical change, and finally to outlast it." This statement of faith comes easy to Novelist Graf...