OPERA REVIEWS: All 4 Productions
Rolled Out At Glimmerglass Festival
Cast of International Excellence In ‘Ariadne’
By ROBERT MOYNIHAN • allotsego.com
Richard Strauss's “Ariadne auf Naxos,” auf Upstate German humor? Supposedly, it doesn't exist outside Klink's Stalag on aging TV. An oddity of reputation is that Germany, after two murderous conflagrations, may even now be wrongly cast.
Arecent book claims that most "higher things" in the U.S. came from France. Not so. Most of our higher musical culture came from Deutschland. German-speaking populations in major U.S. cities wanted their symphonies, operas.
They sponsored higher forms of literacy in urban libraries and museums. German was the most studied foreign language in America before 1917-18.
