Word: aida
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...scenery dates back to 1908, but the theater's acoustics are still near perfect. This week, slightly faded but resonant, Covent Garden celebrates its 100th birthday in a gala performance for the Queen. The generous birthday package includes extracts from The Bohemian Girl, The Trojans, Peter Grimes, Aida, I Puritani (Maria Callas singing), plus the Royal Ballet's Birthday Offering...
...spring catalogue of Jackson & Perkins Co., the world's biggest rose growers. This spring the J. & P. catalogue displayed more than 120 different varieties of roses in all floral colors except blue, breathlessly described them in the rosiest of prose. Among the new roses to dream over were Aida ("displays the same majestic grandeur and dark beauty as its namesake"), Golden Fleece ("performs with all the grace and beauty of a flirting ballerina") and Spartan ("no race of men ever existed as strong and vigorous as the Spartans...
...production of Aida, the Rome Opera puts onstage 600 people, plus two chariots drawn by six horses each, plus two camels. For a production of Donizetti's Poliuto, it mustered 1,200 people and two lions. Such habits have saddled Italian opera companies with groaning annual deficits, which in recent history have been paid by the government. For weeks now, politicians, newspapers and plain opera lovers have been raising shrill voices in protest against a proposed cut in government opera subsidies...
...Maria's private impresario and only agent. "Why should I give those damned agencies 10% or 20% of what I make?" she asked. Meneghini coaxed old Conductor Tullio Serafin, now 77, to coach her, and the two went to work. In Turin, before she was to appear as Aida, a curious critic wandered into the theater at 9 a.m. to find her onstage, going over every passage again and again. while Serafin interrupted, corrected, polished tirelessly. They worked until midnight, were at it again early next day. Callas' Aida became Turin's biggest postwar success...
...when Meneghini suggested that she give up singing, her demon drove her on. Success was in sight. La Scala asked her to do a guest performance of Aida. She accepted, but professed to scoff at the honor: "Sure, it's a magnificent theater. But me, I'm myopic. For me, theaters all look alike. La Scala is La Scala, but I'm Callas. and I'm myopic. Ecco...