Word: aria
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...center after a protest rally in the Old Town Square in front of the monument to the 15th century Czech reformer Jan Hus. In the evening, demonstrators waving Czech flags marched to the National Theater, where the audience later gave a thunderous, emotional ovation to the final aria of Smetana's opera Libuse...
...flashing lights, it unfolded a plotless jumble of scenes that might have resulted from a collaboration by Brecht, Beckett and Buster Keaton. "Nobody looks at me," sang one character in a typically enigmatic line, "therefore I retrace my steps." In another episode, a scruffy charwoman incongruously trilled out an aria while brandishing a three-foot wooden spoon at the other characters...
Although Gaunt dies rather early in the play, Josef Sommer makes him unforgettable. Gaunt's great panegyrie on England ("this scept'red isle") usually emerges as a one-key aria. But Sommer takes his time with it, carefully shapes its rhythms and dynamics, and lovingly introduces modulations--so that the whole thing comes across as a miniature scena with dramatic form. I have never heard it done better...
...Time, fall 1966; place, Lincoln Center. In her dressing room at the new home of the New York City Opera, Beverly is following the operatic custom of recalling events too numerous and complex to fit dramatically into a single scene. In the dazzling aria di bravura, Wasn't It Operatic?, she sings of her successful debut in Die Fledermaus in 1955, and of her subsequent leading roles in Faust, Don Giovanni and The Ballad of Baby Doe. A quartet of music critics, bearing bouquets of flowery superlatives, utters the rousing paean, These Tired Ears Lo at Long Last Rejoice...
...Bach composed the aria and 30 variations for his pupil, Johann Gottlieb Theophilus Goldberg, who wanted a little bit of night music to play for his patron, Count Hermann Carl von Kaiserling, a sickly insomniac...