Marcel Prawy
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Marcel Prawy (birth name: Marcel Horace Frydmann,
With the help of his confidante
His work in opera
From 1955 on, Prawy served as
He became widely known and highly regarded because of a television and radio broadcast series produced by the ORF, where he introduced his viewers and listeners to the world of opera and operetta with outstanding knowledge and great humor.
Prawy maintained close friendships with many prominent singers, composers and musicians, such as Leonard Bernstein and Robert Stolz. He was awarded numerous awards and honours in Austria and internationally, including honorary citizenship of Vienna and of Miami. Hardly anyone succeeded in picturing opera for his audience as impressively and fervently as he did, and thus Prawy became an institution as the National Opera Guide (Opernführer der Nation).
In his final years, Prawy was quite frank about his unique, and rather eccentric, method of archiving his enormous collection of theatre programmes, recordings, letters, photographs, personal notes, and similar loose sheets gathered over many decades. Although Prawy lived in a room at the Hotel Sacher, he invited journalists into the private apartment he was still keeping: it contained thousands of plastic shopping bags, each of which was carefully labelled so that he could readily access any information he needed.
On his 90th birthday in 2001, a special celebration was held for him in the Vienna State Opera. Prawy's death in 2003, of a
Publications
- Prawy, Marcel (1970), The Vienna Opera. London: ISBN 0-297-00134-5
- Prawy, Marcel (1982), Richard Wagner: Leben und Werk. Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag. ASIN B000EEJP7Q
- Prawy, Marcel (1991), Johann Strauss. Vienna: ISBN 3-8000-3393-3
- Prawy, Marcel (2002), Marcel Prawy erzählt aus seinem Leben. ...und seine Vision der Oper des 21. Jahrhunderts. Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau ISBN 3-218-00690-2
References
Much of the content of this article comes from the equivalent German-language Wikipedia article.
Notes
Sources
- ISBN 3-85498-174-0