Word: attila
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They don't care if you're Attila the Hun as long as you do what they want...
...describes herself as a protege of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, and she learned his ruthless style well enough to qualify as probably the toughest woman in American politics -"Attila the Hen," enemies call her. But Jane Byrne is a different sort of mayor. Daley gave Chicago two decades of predictability. Byrne has given Chicago two years of ceaseless, sometimes wacky, surprise. Daley believed in saying little, honoring promises, maintaining grudges. Byrne snaps out her feelings and shifts alliances without warning. Byrne has a whim of iron: in just two years she ran through four police chiefs, three planning directors...
...Attila is one of Verdi's patriotic operas. Set in A.D. 452, when the Huns were at the gates of Rome, it was wildly successful at its 1846 premiere in Venice. A line in the prologue inflamed the imagination of a people yearning for national unification: "You can have the universe," sings Ezio, a Roman general, to Attila, "but leave Italy to me." In Risorgimento Italy, these were fighting words, and audiences recognized them as such...
...score has two powerful moments that foreshadow the composer's mature style. The first comes in the opening, when the heroine Odabella (Soprano Marilyn Zschau) confronts Attila (Bass Samuel Ramey), who has just killed her father and razed her city, Aquileia. In a fiery aria laced with coloratura, she swears vengeance. Around her a chorus of barbarians praises Attila's conquests. The scene is an early example of the art of dramatic juxtaposition perfected at the end of the third act of Otello, with lago gloating over his fallen master as the Venetians outside sing the Moor...
...second occurs at the close of the first act. An old man appears to Attila in a dream, barring the Hun's way to Rome. "You are appointed as scourge only against mankind," he tells him, in tones that forecast the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos. "This is the territory of the gods." When Attila encounters the man-historically, Pope Leo I-in the flesh, he hears the same words, set to the same melody, which Verdi has also used in that scene to raise the curtain on Attila's uneasy slumber. The act ends with a majestic...