Word: castaing
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...roles, and one of the most challenging in the repertory. As Norma, the Druid priestess, Callas came before her audience looking strikingly handsome in flowing robes, her dark hair aglitter with silver leaves. Midway in the first act, when she launched into the opera's most famed aria, Casta Diva, the house was hushed in taut expectancy. All of the familiar intensity was there, and the first notes were luminously clear. But as the aria moved into the upper registers, the voice seemed to darken and tremble. The audience responded with a mixture of hisses and bravos. Callas lifted...
...Gossipist Elsa Maxwell, and sobbingly told opera officials outside her door that she could not go on. Because Callas herself had refused to have an understudy at rehearsal, the management had no choice but to cancel the rest of the performance. Cracked an American in the audience: "After this Casta Diva, they may just cast a diva into the Tiber...
...drew in succession three fightless Ferdinands. Rather than cheat the crowd, Girón stepped out and offered personally to buy a fourth bull (cost: about $500). Again, with a blend of perfect art and courage, he earned two ears and the tail. "This bullfighter," wrote Critic Curro Castañares, "valiant beyond all possibility of exaggeration, is of the artistic order of the great matadors...
...first number was the opera's famed Casta Diva (Stainless Goddess), which, while not Norma's most difficult number, is hardly a piece to warm up on. She threaded her way carefully but spiritedly through the opera's complicated cadenzas with a generous use of her pearly pianissimo, came dramatically and vocally into her own in the second and third acts and at the end, despite signs of weariness (she began to sing sharp), won a personal ovation. Most thrilling moments: her soaring duets with Mezzo-Soprano Fedora Barbieri...
...going. In Manhattan, Broadway had just lost two more legitimate theaters to TV:* the 3,000-seat Center Theatre will be converted by NBC into one of the world's largest TV studios; the Mansfield Theatre (former home of such Broadway hits as The Green Pastures, Anna Lu-casta), which CBS will lease for five years. In Hollywood, CBS announced last week that it was also buying a 13-acre site now occupied by Gilmore Stadium, the ball park of the Pacific Coast League Hollywood Stars. At a cost of $35 million, CBS will erect a five-building Television...