Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ingenuous, Ingenious. Herge's sunny creation is an ingenuous, ingenious teenage adventurer named Tintin, who acts like a Rover Boy, looks like the early Skeezix with his upswept lock of hair, and is easily Europe's most popular comic-strip character. French children once named him their favorite hero in a magazine poll, gave him nearly three times as many votes as Napoleon. Compared to U.S. characters, Tintin has a close kinship to Little Orphan Annie in his devotion to morality. Like Annie, oddly enough, Tintin has undeveloped eyes, e.g., she has circles but no dots...
Tintin (pronounced roughly: Tantan) has been scotching evil since 1929, now appears in dozens of papers and magazines across Europe. A Tintin comic book sells 250,000 copies a week; Tintin hard-cover book sales have reached 8,000,000. French stores sell Tintin soap, underwear and pajamas; null heads of the boy and his dog disconcertingly survey Brussels from the top of a nine-story building built by Herge's publisher...
Domenico Cimarosa was a fast and witty writer of Italian opera who cranked out some 65 works in a comparatively short lifetime (he died at 51). The only one that survives is No. 49-a comic opera titled ll Matrimonio Segreto, which pleased Austria's Emperor Leopold II so much at the premiere that he demanded a repeat of the entire score as an encore. Last week Manhattan concertgoers turned out to sample another side of Cimarosa's musical personality. The occasion: the first known public performance of a requiem Mass written by Cimarosa in Russia...
...great historical importance, for it fixed the French light opera style for a hundred years. It was the chief stylistic source for the Offenbach comic operas, as well as for the Gilbert & Sullivan ones. But Goldovsky has proven to anyone's satisfaction that it is more than a textbook "influence," that it is an eminently viable stage work today and does not merit the obscurity into which it has fallen, especially when the almost ubiquitous Barber of Seville is not a whit better...
Goldovsky is a staunch advocate of performing foreign operas in English. I have come around to his view-point, but only in regard to comic opera. I still feel the advantages of doing tragedy in the original are unassailable. At any rate, Ory is being done in a colloquially up-to-date and often witty rhymed English translation by Robert A. Simon. And the diction of the singers is surprisingly good...