Word: albans
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During rehearsals there had been more excitement than usual among the stagehands at the Metropolitan Opera. Alban Berg's classic 20th century opera Lulu was being mounted for the first time in the company's history, but that was not it: to stagehands one opera is as memorable as another. What held their eyes was a makeshift dressing room right behind the sets. No wonder. The star of the show would regularly dash into it for a series of quick costume changes, some of her garments being scantier than others. As the opening-night audience soon learned, Soprano...
...lean, tweedy, modest man, Britten hated it when people referred to this composer or that, even him, as "the greatest." "Of course you can be the tallest composer," he said once. "Alban Berg was probably the tallest composer and Mahler was probably the shortest. But how can you judge that a particular composer was the greatest? Today Bach is considered greater than Handel, yet 100 years ago the opposite was true." For Britten it was enough, as he put it, "if people want to hear what you have written." In his case they...
Died. Helene Berg, 92, widow of the Austrian composer Alban Berg (Wozzeck); in Vienna. Reputedly the natural daughter of Emperor Franz Joseph, Helene was devoted to her husband until his death in 1935 and then became a fierce guardian of his works. She felt she was in communion with his spirit and refused to release the nearly finished third act of his last opera, Lulu, which is usually pieced together from dialogue and Berg's music for performances. It will be presented by the Metropolitan Opera for the first time this winter...
...pondered the question is Dean Francis Sayre of the Washington Cathedral, who a few days ago passed his 25th anniversary up on Mount St. Alban, which looks out over the capital. He is one of eleven people born in the White House (Jan. 17,1915, in a small chamber near the Lincoln Bedroom), grandson of Woodrow Wilson, onetime secretary to F.D.R.'s political chief James Farley and friend or acquaintance of every President since then. The lanky Sayre has some of the Wilson profile and a lot of the inner fiber: he denounced McCarthyism, stood with the civil rights...
...back cover of TIME), Cycladic sculpture and Mesopotamian idols, the "archaic smile" distorted into a toothy leer. They are also drenched in evocative rhetoric about monstrous, insatiable female deities. The Women have been compared, severally and together, to the destroying Kali, to Robert Graves' White Goddess, to Alban Berg's Lulu, to Lilith and Marlene and Marilyn and Mona Lisa. Now obviously these drawings do have their demonic aspect - the air of Woman, circa 1951, with her staring black pupils, bared teeth and cuirass-like breasts, testifies to that; they are not just formal exercises. It certainly seems...