Word: ch
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...girl, took the toreador from the bull into the prize ring and turned the words from Spanish-flavored French into minstrel-show English. With all these modern wonders, the Metropolitan Opera dared to compete, by staging a revival of Umberto Giordano's opera of the French Revolution, Andrea Chénier, a work it has not done in 21 years...
...Groove. Giordano's 58-year-old opera, loosely based on a true episode, tells how the young Poet Chénier becomes successively enamored of the French Revolution and a French beauty, only to lose both his love and his own head to the guillotine. Also swept up in the swirling action is a servant who turns revolution ary and finds his new power as bitter as his old servitude. The Italian libretto is full of mysterious letters, whispered warnings and preposterous melodramatics. Nevertheless, the opera does convey tremendous theatrical excitement and a sharp sense of the great revolutionary...
Composer Giordano (1867-1948) made his most successful effort with Chénier (others: Fedora, Madame Sans-Gene). The opera's melodies may sing a little too much like Verdi's without Verdi's dramatic thrust; its flow may be as slippery as Wagner's without Wagner's soaring sense of continuity. But it has a ravishing choral addio (Act I), a roof-raising farewell duet, and cannily applause-getting arias for all of its principal singers...
...yellow-starred flags hung from stores and warehouses, from shacks and villas, from cycle-taxis that darted along uncrowded boulevards. Portraits of Malenkov, Mao and Ho stared out from the stalls of the peddlers. At main intersections there were bamboo arches of triumph, decked with papier-mâché peace doves and slogans that proclaimed "INDEPENDENCE" or "PEACE" or "PRESIDENT HO FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS." No exception, no dissent was permitted in Hanoi's show of joy; nobody forgot to display his enthusiasm, or was too lazy to bother...
...rarely dull. Things hummed more than usual during Ali's high-octane fling at marriage with mercurial Cinemactress Rita Hayworth. Recalls Williams: "The day after she had dined ... at the home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, I realized that Rita was determined to remodel the Château de l'Horizon on the lines of the Windsor establishment. Prince Ali's maids, who for years had worn gay summer prints and went bare-legged except for formal occasions, were measured for crisp black-and-white uniforms. Rita made them all wear black silk stockings...