Word: cos
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General Manager Bing had been listening to a rehearsal of the Metropolitan Opera's third opera in English this season. The first two, Fledermaus and Cosí Fan Tutte, were brilliant hits, in which almost every word came through clearly. But after listening to his singers maim a new translation of Puccini's one-act comic opera, Gianni Schicchi, Bing was about ready to concede that it might as well be sung in Bantu. In this, as it turned out at the performance the next night, Bing had merely anticipated public opinion...
...Easy Lessons. When General Manager Rudolf Bing first asked Actor Lunt to direct Così, he told him that all he had to do was to make it "light, gay and elegant." Protested Lunt: "You cannot get those opera singers up on their points with six lessons from Madame LaZonga."* But once he had listened to Mozart's elegantly subtle score (unheard at the Met since 1928), Lunt accepted the challenge...
...right kind of wine glasses; he set his famed actress wife Lynn Fontanne to sewing lace hankies for "my girls," later, sent her backstage to perk up one discouraged singer with a little flattery. He huddled for hours with Designer Rolf Gerard on how to frame chamber-sized Così in the yawning spaces of the Met's big stage. Gerard's solution: a chamber-sized stage contrived by drapes and latticed arches, brilliantly simple sets in handsome pastels and white...
Thereafter, Mozart and a first-rate cast took over. There were no stars: Così is strictly an ensemble opera. But all hands -Eleanor Steber, Blanche Thebom, Patrice Munsel, Frank Guarrera, Richard Tucker, John Brownlee-somehow seemed to sing and look better than ever. They sang in understandable English, and carried themselves with the flawlessly sophisticated artificiality which Così, and Director Lunt, demanded...
Light, gay and elegant for its full three hours, it was the best production the Met has put on in a decade. Così has usually been more of a festival favorite than a standard repertory piece. In making a smashing new hit for itself, the Met has also clearly found a new repertory regular -to be played right along with Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, as it deserves...