Word: ch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Until June, Goukouni's rebel forces controlled a third of the country and seemed prepared to march on N'Djamena from the eastern town of Abéché. Strengthened by the delivery of more than 400 tons of arms and ammunition from France, however, Habré's army recaptured Abéché last month. After Goukouni lost Faya-Largeau, Gaddafi apparently concluded that only direct Libyan assistance could prevent a total rout of the Chadian rebels. But by sending in his air force and thereby provoking the U.S. to step up its support for Habr...
...Tenor Reiner Goldberg, Solti's original choice to sing the difficult role of Siegfried, had been fired (true). Soprano Hildegard Behrens, the Brünnhilde, had quit (false). The Hall production, with sets by Designer William Dudley, would be the biggest fiasco since ... well, since 1976, when Patrice Chéreau scandalized the good burghers with his iconoclastic, neo-Marxist Ring...
True, alas. But whereas Chéreau's épater le bourgeois production eventually was seen as a bold, original interpretation that one could take or leave but not ignore, Hall's is something else again. It lacks precisely the quality that defined Chéreau's work: a conceptual framework...
Hall, 52, has explicitly rejected Chéreau's revolutionary premise ("The Ring does not say that to me at all"), but offers in its place only the unremarkable notion that Wagner "elevated a fairy tale into adult myth." In staging the production, Hall said, he would try to follow closely the composer's own detailed stage directions to return to a romantic Ring. This faithfulness to the original-what the Germans call Werktreue-is admirable and, in this day of extravagant operatic reinterpretations, almost avantgarde...
DIED. David Niven, 73, Scottish-born actor and author, who defined debonair for millions of moviegoers; apparently of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the progressive neuromuscular disorder often called Lou Gehrig's disease; at Château-d'Oex, Switzerland. A Sandhurst graduate and veteran of four years with the Highland Light Infantry, Niven resigned his commission in 1932 and became a New York liquor salesman. Influential acquaintances lured him to Hollywood, where he signed a seven-year contract with Movie Mogul Sam Goldwyn, despite having almost no acting experience. Niven served with distinction as a British commando officer...