Word: anatole
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Shut up in a neat, clean prison cell (expressive of hygienic Swiss democracy). Sam tries to keep a cool head. He learns that he is taken for a Swiss named Anatol Ludwig Stiller, who disappeared six years ago. Stiller, it seems, callously abandoned his wife, Ballet Dancer Julika, when she was half dead with tuberculosis; he also left unpaid debts and broke Swiss law by failing, as a reservist, to ask the authorities for permission to leave the country. "I'm not Stiller!" Sam keeps shouting. But after Stiller's old conscript's uniform, much moth-eaten...
NICOLAI GEDDA, 31. born in Stockholm of Russian-Swedish parents (his father was a baritone in the Don Cossack Chorus), did well in his Met debut as Faust, outdid himself as Ottavio in Don Giovanni, Anatol in Vanessa. Tall for a tenor-his pressagent, measuring with a basketball coach's rubber ruler, claims 6 ft. 3 in. -Gedda offers a clear, sweet voice that may lack warmth ("Champagne rather than Chianti," says one critic), but has strength and purity. His acting is intelligent, his pronunciation unusually correct for the opera stage; he is a linguist, speaks seven languages...
...this time undertook to serve as librettist to his longtime friend Sam Barber. Menotti's yarn is like a pulse-bumping 19th century melodrama that lacks the courage of its afflictions. The lover, when he finally arrives, is not the man Vanessa was waiting for, but his son Anatol, a fatally charming young man who promptly seduces Vanessa's niece Erika. From there on the plot seems to thunder toward a traditional deathbed climax: Vanessa falls in love with Anatol, they announce their engagement, and pregnant Erika rushes out into the bitter, stormy night. Yet death and destruction...
...soon as a dream is realized it is destroyed; waiting and hoping are the whole of life. Composer Barber, 47, had to do a good deal of waiting himself. Menotti wrote the libretto in intermittent stretches over an 18-month period ("At one point," says Barber, "he left Anatol standing in a drafty doorway in deep winter for months"). Barber himself named the leading character after scanning a What-to-call-your-baby book entitled Name This Child...
Back on his feet, he performed old hits of his such as his racing tongued show-stopper from Lady in the Dark, "Ugly Duckling" from Hans Christian Anderson and "Anatol of Paris." The audience was enthusiastically ready to doubt him when he interrupted at one point to say, "there is nobody living in the entire world who likes to hear me entertain better than...