Word: straussed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Munich Opera House has long rested much of its reputation on those two sturdy musical pillars, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss. Last week, as if to say that anything these two composed is worth audition, Munich opened its summer opera festival with two of the lamest and most persistently neglected of Mozart's and Strauss's works: Thames, King of Egypt, which Mozart composed at a precocious 17, and Der Friedenstag, written when Strauss was a world-weary...
Munich's other resurrection, Strauss's Der Friedenstag, also suffered from a weak book-as did all of Strauss's operas after the death of Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Strauss had wanted Novelist Stefan Zweig as his librettist, but he was advised-i.e., ordered-by the Nazis to find a text writer of pure Aryan stock. His choice was Library Director Joseph Gregor, whose first draft was so hopeless ("Your dialogue between the two commanders is all wrong," wrote Strauss furiously; "it reads like two school teachers") that Zweig secretly rewrote the whole thing. Acclaiming...
Rather than wage their campaign on major national problems, Brandt and the Socialists have stressed minor domestic welfare reforms, such as in air pollution, and have warned that a vote for "Der Alter" may be a vote for Franz Josef Strauss, the Christian Democrat's controversial Defense Minister, should Adenauer die in office...
Cannibalistic Sex Kitten. As portrayed by Soprano Tynes, Strauss's 16-year-old heroine seemed not so much indecent as psychopathic-a kind of cannibalistic sex kitten. Moving about the stage with catlike grace, her rich, ringing voice zooming with ease through the high, precarious lines, Tynes was by turns willful, vindictive, enraged. Dressed in a gold leotard, she moved with such sinuous authority through the notorious Dance of the Seven Veils (which most sopranos manage to make about as seductive as a mazurka) that some critics could not decide whether she was more gifted as singer or dancer...
Tynes's fine performance got strong backing from other American singers, particularly Mezzo-Soprano Lili Chookasian, 35, a voice teacher from Northwestern University, and Negro Tenor George Shirley, 27. Conductor Thomas Schippers handled Strauss's surging score with such brilliant control that he might even have satisfied the composer's father, who muttered when he heard Salome: "0 God, what nervous music! It is exactly as if one had one's trousers full of May bugs...