Word: catalans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tension and maneuverings behind the portly figure of the Caudillo. The style of his reporting is vividly fresh. Reid takes the reader into open cafes and closed discussions, where he allows him to have a glass of wine and eavesdrop. The speakers are Basque seamen and financiers, Catalan laborers, Castillian artists. The mood is apprehensive, comic, and speculative by turns. Reid is very enthusiastic about this method, which he calls "creative reportage." With it, he tries to convey "how it feels to be alive in a particular place in a particular time...
First on the scene was Juan Carlos. The prince stepped off the plane from Lisbon with an inappropriately gay smile and wearing impeccably cut sports clothes. Accompanied by his wife, Greek Princess Sophie, he set out for an inspection trip surrounded by foppishly elegant Catalan aristocrats. They were received unenthusiastically by small crowds of grieving townsfolk. Shouted a group of grimy men in Tarrasa: "Less talk and more pick and shovel...
...with a characteristic grimace, began to draw out the golden notes of Mendelssohn's Trio in D Minor. Then there were Schumann's fluid Adagio and Allegro and five Concert Pieces by Couperin. As an encore, Casals played his own arrangement-virtually his theme song-of the Catalan melody, Chant of the Birds...
Conductor Antal Dorati faced 17 musicians wearing 18th century breeches, periwigs and white silk hose. On a balcony overhead. Surrealist Artist Salvador Dali abruptly appeared in a Venetian gondolier's outfit and a red Catalan cap, began splashing brown and gold paint on a canvas with such vehemence that he spattered the astonished audience below. With a flourish, he ripped the canvas open-and out flew a dozen frightened homing pigeons, to flap about looking wildly for their cote...
Through all this interference, Mezzo Soprano Fiorenza Cossotto and Bass Lorenzo Alvary-the opera's entire singing cast-struggled to tell Scarlatti's simple allegory of an aging Roman centurion's efforts to win a Catalan coquette long after the decline of the Roman Empire had doomed to failure any such suit. The singers struggled against impossible odds. Three more curtain-size Dali tableaux fell, each full of the usual Dalian symbols: butterflies, breasts, limp watches and legions of crutches...