Word: belleri
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...Poverelle buried Sister Dinarosa Belleri last week on a hot morning in the plague city of Kikwit. The pallbearers wore green gowns, heavy boots, plastic goggles and white helmets as they pushed a rickety stretcher over the potholes on the road from the main hospital to the Cathedral of St. Francois Xavier. She was the fourth sister to die of the fever, and by this time the nuns had learned to take no chances...
...think, 'Here is our audience, right down here.' " Born Gretl Maerkl in Bavaria, Singer Belleri was signed for the Met in the summer of 1910, while she was still a Munich schoolgirl. When she reported for duty that fall, she was, at 16, the youngest chorus member in Met history, made her debut in the 1910 season in Aïda, with Caruso. In those days, the chorus was bigger - 120 members - and the newest arrival was paid $24 a week, plus $2 for solos. In the present unionized chorus, Belleri earns around $155 a week...
Three Regimes. Since that first Aïda, Mezzo Belleri (who was married to Tenor Lamberto Belleri, also a longtime member of the Met chorus until his death in 1945) has appeared in more than 100 different operas, often in as many as eight performances a week. And she has witnessed three management changes - Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Edward Johnson and Rudolf Bing...
...memories are crowded with the kind of incident that the chorus is usually the first to notice - and the first to cover up: the time Dramatic Soprano Rosa Ponselle got carried away in the fight scene of Carmen's Act I and yanked two strands of Mezzo Belleri's braids out by the roots; or the occasion, in Liszt's rarely performed Saint Elizabeth, when one soldier lost his tights, causing Conductor Artur Bodanzky to go into such a seizure of laughter that the orchestra had to finish the scene by itself. During half a century, Mezzo...
...part of her 50th-anniversary celebration last week, Chorister Belleri got a complete set of Metropolitan Opera Annals and the privilege of taking Saturday night off (she promptly took a second-row seat for La Forza del Destino). At a party, General Manager Bing, who has just finished his first decade at the Met, gave her the highest accolade. "Ten years is almost too much for me," sighed he. "How did you ever stand...