Word: bassos
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...Basso Kipnis decided to become a U. S. citizen and marry a U. S. woman, settled in Chicago. During the Chicago Opera's peak years under Impresario Mary Garden, Kipnis was one of its brightest stars. When the Chicago Opera folded in 1932, opera fans thought New York's Metropolitan would salvage Basso Kipnis from the wreck. Nearly every European opera house (including Bayreuth and the Salzburg Festival) rushed to sign up Kipnis, but the Met did not join the rush...
Last week world-famed, 48-year-old Basso Kipnis finally made his Metropolitan debut. Bearded and berobed in the usually boresome part of Holy-Grailer Gurnemanz in Wagner's lengthy Parsifal, Kipnis stole the show from Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, acted not only with his face and hands but with his voice as well. When Basso Kipnis was through with him, Gurnemanz had passed from muscle-bound youth to tottering old age without missing a footstep, and critics assured one another that a finer Gurnemanz had not been seen in a generation...
...years ago, shocked into action by the silicosis scandal of Gauley Bridge, W. Va.* (TIME, Feb. 3, 1936), the National Committee for People's Rights (founded by Theodore Dreiser in 1931, supported by contributions from such literati as Louis Adamic, Hamilton Basso, John Chamberlain, Waldo Frank) sent a committee to Tri-State to study the health of the miners. Among the committee members: Economist James Raymond Walsh of Hobart College, Sociologist Esther Lucile Brown of the Russell Sage Foundation, Dr. Adelaide Helen Ross Smith, Manhattan silicosis expert, Socialite Sheldon Dick, Manhattan photographer...
...last-witness. Solemnly and heavily he sat in the witness-chair, his coal-miner's pallor* heightened by his rumpled white suit, a Havana perfecto gripped deep in his big chops. In his usual low rumble he began to speak. Gradually the rumble rolled up into a basso roar as his jowls filled with rage. He pounded the committee-table till the ashtrays jumped, then exploded in a statement which will be remembered long after the election...
Greatest impersonation of the late Basso Feodor Chaliapin was the fear-racked 17th-Century Tsar in Moussorgsky's Boris Godounov. In 1908, Chaliapin was the first man to sing Boris outside of Russia, in 1929 the last to sing it at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. Other bassos -notably the Metropolitan's Adamo Didur, the Chicago Opera's Vanni Marcoux-donned the wig and beard of Boris, but they were haunted by the Chaliapin performance, just as in the opera the Tsar is haunted in his biggest scenes by the wraith of the young heir...