Word: countess
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Blood Countess shows signs of that pastime. Codrescu mixes amorphous bits about the Hungarian State Archive with speculations surrounding Bathory. He further conflates legend and scholarship through his fictional Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, a descendant of the countess who lives in the U.S. and craves to be punished for a death in Hungary...
Europe's benchmark bloodsucker is generally considered to be Vlad the Impaler, an inspiration for Dracula. Andrei Codrescu's novel The Blood Countess (Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $23) offers an equally unattractive alternative: Elizabeth Bathory, a 16th century Hungarian tyrant alleged to have killed 650 girls in the belief that bathing in their blood would preserve her youth and beauty. Though never tried for mass murder, Bathory is said to have been confined to a room of her castle, where after five years she died...
...Countess Albina du Boisrouvray's $20 million gift to the School of Public Health progressed along the typical lines, if such things can be said to exist for such a large gift--with the exception of the fact that she had no previous ties to Harvard...
...ensemble works. Glyndebourne has more arresting and ambitious productions in its warehouse. But if the Figaro sets were pedestrian, the cast lived up to the company's formidable reputation for ensemble excellence (though there were standouts, notably Hagley and Marie-Ange Todorovitch, as Cherubino). Poor Renee Fleming, as the Countess, was stuck with the staging's only coarse moments. Somehow director Stephen Medcalf thought to dramatize the lady's unhappiness by portraying her in a kind of sexual heat. While Susanna is singing "Dei vieni non tardar," Mozart's heavenly, healing, last-act aria, the Countess is writhing around...
...further complicate matters, Countess Malcolm (Margit Carlqvist) is jealous of Desiree, and Henrik (Bjorn Bjelvenstam), Egerman's grown son from his first marriage, is in love with Anne. Old Mrs. Armfeldt, prodded by her daughter, invites everyone to spend the weekend at her country estate. During the course of the summer night, and under the influence of a mysterious love potion served at dinner, eight people turn into four couples...