Word: aria
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...just after the turn of the century, in the golden age of U.S. opera. On the stage of the Metropolitan the great Australian-born Soprano Nellie Melba was singing Marguerite's spinning-wheel aria in Gounod's Faust. In midphrase Nellie was interrupted by the clatter of half a dozen wax cylinders which smashed down one after the other from the fly floor high above the stage. There, in brown suit and wing collar, crouched a spidery little man over an Edison cylinder gramophone with a horn almost as big as he was. Although he lost the Melba...
...grinding of the cylinders was still clearly audible to the singers on the stage. Mapleson ran his machine intermittently for two or three minutes, shutting it off when the singers below moved out of the horn's direct line of hearing. He also lost many a fine aria simply because of the delicacy of his machine: the slightest vibration in the vicinity was enough to break the fine connection of needle with...
...arrived in a carriage drawn by several men in tail coats and top hats. Thus prepared, the audience was scarcely surprised to see Sarastro roaming the Temple of Wisdom in a business suit, or later sitting on Pamina's bed in a modern bedroom while singing the famed aria In Diesen Heil'gen Hallen with its Masonic message of brotherly love. In the background loomed towers of concentration camps, cages filled with ballet dancers, and an assortment of plain kitchen chairs...
...muttering little associated fragments of knowledge. Like a boxer staying down for a count of nine, he takes all the time he can possibly get ("Let's skip that part, please, and come back to it"). When trying to identify the character in La Traviata who sings the aria Sempre libera, he half-whispered: "She sings it right at the end of a party given by ... What's her name! Soprano. Her name is like . . . Violetta. Violetta!" Some viewers get the feeling that he knows most of the answers immediately and simply makes the audience squirm...
...pretty street singer who ditches her poor but honest boy friend (Baritone Theodor Uppman) for a viceroy of Peru, Soprano Patrice Munsel does some discreet bumps and grinds, rides an ass, and prettily sings the operetta's best-known tune, a farewell aria to her sweetheart-one of those lovely, almost-convincing pieces of lyricism that Offenbach turned out along with his musical ironies. In addition to the ass ridden by Soprano Munsel-a beast named Amos, rented at $30 a night-Actor-Director Ritchard has assigned himself a black charger for a grand entrance as the viceroy. This...