Word: straussed
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...long and highly successful career as composer and conductor, the late Richard Strauss formed some sharply spiced opinions on music and musicians. Frequently he got a few on paper. Last week Western Europeans were chuckling over a selection of his articles, essays and open letters published by Zurich's Atlantis Verlag under the title Reflections and Reminiscences...
...Strauss was by no means happy with the way conductors handled Beethoven and his favorite, Mozart. "Some so-called wizards of the baton," he wrote, "play Beethoven and Mozart finales as though they were riding a shying horse and had lost the reins." Strauss also felt that he himself had been badly dealt with by publishers, stage directors and actors. His father, first horn at the Munich court opera, had to contribute 1,000 marks ($238) to the printing cost of the F-Minor Symphony. "My fee for Don Juan," Strauss recorded, "was 800 marks ... for Eulenspiegel...
Baron Ochs, the clumsy gallant of Der Rosenkavalier, Strauss thought was consistently misunderstood and misplayed. Instead of "a vulgar monster with a horrible make-up and proletarian manners," as most bassos represented him, Strauss intended him as "a rustic beau, a Don Juan of some 35 years, but nevertheless a nobleman . . . Inwardly he is gross (ein Schmutzian), but outwardly he remains quite presentable . . . Above all, his first scene in the bedroom must be played with extreme delicacy and discretion, it must not be repulsive ... In short, Viennese comedy, not Berlin farce...
Into the Pit. Some of the enthusiasm reached the pit. From the instant Conductor Reiner slashed the air with the downbeat, the Met's musicians plunged into the lush ripeness of Strauss's score like field mice set at fragrant cheddar. But little of the enthusiasm got through to the cast onstage...
...Marschallin, whom Strauss describes as "a beautiful woman of 32 . . . with Viennese grace and lightness," who has "one wet eye" from the loss of her young lover Octavian "and one dry" with sophistication, pretty Soprano Eleanor Steber could not quite make up in tenderness and charm what she lacked in opulence. Contralto Risë Stevens' attractive singing as Octavian was marred only by her unattractive grimacing. Even so, with Veteran Bass Eugene List as Baron Ochs, and with the help of two new imports, Dresden's Coloratura Erna Berger as a pert, brilliant Sophie, and Vienna...