Word: strausses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Richard Strauss completed his last opera, Capriccio, in 1941. but the world that he and co-Librettist Clemens Kraus invoked in their "conversation piece for music" was as remote in spirit from the chaos of a Bremen or a Mannheim as Strauss's Bavarian mountain retreat was from the final convulsions of the Third Reich. The subject is opera itself-the relative merits of words and music-and it might just as aptly have been summed up under the title Six Characters in Search of an Opera. In a rococo salon near Paris, the six main figures sit chatting...
Capriccio had its premiere in the war-scarred Munich of 1942 and has only rarely been seen outside since. Now in a complete recording (Angel, 3 LPs) for the first time, it proves to be one of Strauss's most fascinating works. Too static for the stage, it is studded with passages of surpassing orchestral and vocal beauty: the sweetly melancholy string sextet that serves as an overture; the delicately interlaced trio in which Musician, Poet and Countess comment on the Poet's sonnet; the Countess' hushed mirror monologue at the close, with its spun-silver vocal...
...chances. In the years since Adenauer took office there have been several contenders for the succession: Schaeffer, the original Finance Minister was the first, but too unsavory a connection with past scandals descredited him. The present foreign minister Heinrich von Brento seems unable to generate enthusiasm; Franz-Josef Strauss, Defense Minister, not composer, was also in the running for a time...
...scramble? Rising industrial production accounts for some of the demand. But chiefly, copper consumers are buying because they fear the price will go still higher if strikes shut the big mines. Says American Smelting & Refining's Vice President Simon Strauss: "Copper consumers have long memories. They remember the copper shortages of several years ago, which were politically rather than economically caused." Strikes have already shut one U.S. smelter and threatened the big mines of Northern Rhodesia. Copper buyers are also hedging the possibility of a strike June 30, when the contract of the International Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers expires...
...debut in Manhattan's Town Hall, Armenian-born Mezzo-Soprano Doloukhanova, 39, strode onstage aglitter with diamonds, and swathed in pink silk wrappings. Her program included Russian songs (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff), Armenian folk songs, Schubert and Strauss lieder, operatic arias from Rossini and Mozart, even one English air-Cyril Scott's Lullaby. Noted for a repertory of 500 works by 100 composers, in five different languages, she displayed a solidly centered, richly colored voice of moderate power, smooth as cream in the lower register, clear and unforced in the upper one. She was able to pay out a prodigious...