Word: aria
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nurturing opera singers. Her father, a Pentecostal minister, played a number of instruments by ear, and her mother, a nurse, was also a pianist. Leona inherited their musical gifts, singing in the church choir and dabbling with the violin. As a senior in high school, she once learned an aria from Aida by rote, since she could not read music. To please a teacher, she auditioned for the music department at Oklahoma City University; to her astonishment, she was offered a full scholarship. In those days, she recalls, "I thought Moon River was serious music. Honey, when...
...stardom in 1912, when the Emperor Franz Josef invited her to join the Vienna Royal Opera. At the Metropolitan Opera, where she sang from 1921 to 1932, the director reported that the largest ovation he had ever heard followed her "Vissi d'arte, "the great second-act aria in Tosca; she sang it prostrate on the floor. A tempestuous diva onstage and off, Jeritza gathered three husbands, prompted whispers of affairs with composers and feuded audaciously with tenors and other sopranos...
...runs this country just the same as the Senate does or General Motors or Alexander Haig, junior." The Mob is funnier. When the Prizzis give a testimonial banquet for one of their number, they hire the world's greatest tenor to sing one song: the number is an aria from Verdi's Les Vépres Siciliennes recounting the slaughter of the defenseless French by Sicilian patriots. The overcrowded hall is set afire by a rival gang, and 89 guests are parboiled. "Miraculously, the Congressmen and the judges came through the fire unharmed...
Above all, Sellars's updating never interferes with the music. In fact, many of his innovations involve clever exploitation of the Handel score. The bouncy rhythms of Dorinda's first-act aria on the ineffable nature of love--she's the beach bunny, nee shepherdess--become the excuse for an hilarious mock-disco strut. Later in the opera, when Dorinda sings of love's bitterness, it is Sellars's inspiration that she pour herself a stiff drink between repetitions (all Orlando's arias consist of six or eight lines repeated again and again), with the result that her octave leaps...
...century, Orlando crosses the river Styx...) and occasionally pretentious ("What is man? What is a man?), for the most part, the notes show the puckish sense of fun that characterizes the production at its best. "This will not do," Sellars writes, "and Zoroastro abandons subtlety and launches into his aria, 'Leave Love and Follow Mars: Go Fight!' (The Pentagon, after all, is what is keeping the space program alive.)" Or for Dorinda's final summons to a festival of love, Sellars's version is "Dorinda--the real miracle worker--invites everybody over to lunch...