Word: wagnerians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...experienced Wagnerian soprano can strike an attitude and hold it motionless for what can seem like a half-hour; but the characters in this umbrous opera of moss on the manse may stay frozen for 20 years or more in the postures of their neuroses. "She did not change again," writes Author Feibleman of the hero's sweetly frigid second wife, "by so much as the amount of cream in her morning coffee." He could have added that the hero himself does not alter by a jot, after a point early in the novel, and neither...
...Doctor's Dilemma (Comet; M-G-M). The Fabian intellect and the Wagnerian soul were the lion and the unicorn of Bernard Shaw's personal mythology and creative life. In his later writings these opposites lie down together peacefully in the green pastures of Creative Evolution, but in The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) the two tendencies almost tear each other, and the play, apart. With all his romantic soul, Shaw longed to write a tragedy of the one and the many, of the creator-criminal murdered by the power of positive thinking and collective morality. With...
Braving the wrath of a doting papa, heavyweight Wagnerian Diva Helen Traubel had some grim memories (in the Ladies' Home Journal) about her three years (1948-51) as teacher to semi-retired Soprano Margaret Truman. Not only was [Margaret's] voice "inexperienced and rather bad," said Traubel, but her own stature in the musical world went heavily down "for ever having my name connected with such a musical aspirant. My first, greatest and unconquerable difficulty with Margaret's voice was simply keeping her on key. There simply was not enough of everything-or of anything to make...
Last year stately, plump Queen Juliana of The Netherlands walked up for her annual Speech from the Throne with the heavy grace of a Wagnerian diva. Last week a trim, svelte (25 Ibs. lighter) Juliana delivered another royal oration, and the London Sunday Dispatch gleefully revealed what it claimed to be the slimming secret: a bland diet ordered by a fat, fiftyish hair-restorer salesman named Jos de Cock, who runs the "Enorga Institute" in The Hague. After an analysis of strips of litmus paper that a prospective weight loser licks after meals, went the story, De Cock devises...
...design which has become one of Wieland's trademarks; e.g., in the bridal scene, when one chorister inclined his head toward the center, another on the opposite side of the stage precisely imitated him. For the first time anyone at Bayreuth can remember, cuts were made in a Wagnerian score; stage action was reduced to such bare essentials that the production was almost as close to oratorio as opera (Wieland prefers to call it a "Christian mystery...