Word: berge
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Pierre Bergé, partner and protector of Yves Saint Laurent, peeks over the battlements at the enemy force below and, as if panicking, fires off a salvo before he has found his aim. "Give me one piece of clothing, one fashion statement that Armani has made that has truly influenced the world...
...temperament is understandable. Bergé has a legend to burnish and a business to run. He sounds like a man who knows strong competition when he sees it taking a stroll down the boulevard, decked out, more than likely, in some splendiferous Armani assemblage. The fact is, Saint Laurent remains the pale eminence of high fashion, in part because of his undisputed creative coups over the years, in part because of his huge volume of business and the relentless mythologizing of the fashion press. The fact is also that while Saint Laurent's contributions have been generative and historic...
...customer. "I don't have in mind either a tall person or a short person, ugly or beautiful, jet set or middle class," Armani says. "I aim at a client who dresses from individual choice, not imposed fashion, and not simply because something was designed by Armani." Snaps Bergé: "I'm in the fashion business, and even I can't tell you what an Armani man or woman is." That is just the point. The fact that it got past Bergé so easily may indicate that the Saint Laurent enterprise has lost its sure touch...
...Zimmermann's sprawling, eclectic but ultimately unsuccessful serialist opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers). First performed in Cologne in 1965, the work was given its American premiere last week by Sarah Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston. With it, an experimental tradition begun by Schoenberg, continued by Alban Berg and refined by avant-gardists of Germany's Darmstadt school of composers in the 1950s comes to a dead end. In fact, that tradition expires in a spectacular artistic auto-da-fé symbolized by the holocaust that is the opera's final scene...
...libretto, drawn from Jakob Michael Lenz's 1776 play, concerns the seduction and degradation of a middle-class girl, Marie, by a group of soldiers, among others. The opera's connections with Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu are obvious. Wozzeck too is about soldiers and their sordid love lives and has a heroine named Marie; like Die Soldaten, it is constructed in 15 self-contained, even aphoristic, scenes. Lulu-like Die Soldaten, a twelve-tone opera-similarly features a heroine who ends up a common prostitute. Zimmermann deliberately invoked the shade of his illustrious predecessor; the challenge...