Word: heroical
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...than his heroine Brünnhilde. Time & again he flung down his pen and paced the floor. He recalled in his autobiography that once "my courage failed me completely, for I could not help asking myself whether the singer had yet been born who was capable of vitalizing this heroic female figure."* The stiffest test in all grand opera is the Brünnhilde of Götterdämmerung. That rôle made big news in Manhattan last week when it was sung for the first time by Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, the Metropolitan's new Norwegian import...
...long been legendary. She sang it in the first Götterdämmerung given in the U. S. in 1888 and therein set a standard which no other singer has ever quite achieved. Vocally she was a match for Wagner's mighty orchestra. Dramatically she was the "heroic female figure" that Wagner imagined. Those who heard her have never forgotten the horror in her voice when she turned on Siegfried, the fury she became when she swore the piercing oath on the spear...
This story of contemporary Sydney is not so much a novel as an interrelated series of portraits; the portraits are not so much human likenesses as translations into brilliant descriptive talk of different types of human problems. Her characters are mostly riff-raff but gloriously magnified and particularized into heroic proportions: Michael, the burnt-out veteran of 32; Baruch, the philosopher of the one-horse printshop; Catherine, the virgin in search of an angel; Chamberlain, the cheerfully hopeless incompetent businessman; Tom Withers, the intelligently rat-minded foreman. Only ordinary character in the book is Joseph, whose very ordinariness lights...
...Sandy, had a way with women and a gift of gab, but the police were after him. On the little Polish steamer in which Sandy and Greta made their getaway from Ireland was a mysterious party of five Englishmen. Leader was Andrew, brilliant bachelor Oxford don, who hid his heroic light under a staid bushel. Andrew was the type of true adventurer, as Sandy was of the shoddy. The expedition's real purpose was not, as given out, to search for butterflies along the Baltic coast, but to hunt through northern Siberia, with or without Soviet permission...
...serves to further emphasize the haunting beauty of his performance. Particularly are the other players impeded by their accents, which immediately put them out of character. Sancho Panza, in the person of George Robey, talks Cockney. And Carrasco with his Oxford lisp seems more the bespectacled grind than the heroic flance. These too noticeable incongruities make it difficult to imagine oneself in the Spain of the seventeenth century...