Word: courtesans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Visually, no part of the production was entirely satisfactory. In his first opera sets Designer Oliver (My Fair Lady) Smith seemed to be desperately attempting to fill the vast, open spaces of the Met's stage with Todd-AO-sized vistas of a kind rarely viewed by a courtesan in Verdi's mid-19th century Paris. Under Tyrone Guthrie's posturing direction, Violetta entertained her first-act guests in a towering, vine-entwined conservatory, while in the third act the chorus moved confusingly up and down a curving marble staircase. Costume Designer Rolf Gerard provided the principal...
...fondly encouraged her, wined and dined her whenever possible. Her life took on a sybaritic pattern. In the morning she usually sang at the piano on a glassed-in terrace outside her bedroom, polishing current roles. Afternoons, she visited her dressmaker or her beautician, taking treatments worthy of a courtesan: cream, oil and electric massages and rubdowns, face packs and facials of every kind. When shopping, she added to a wardrobe that already included 25 fur coats, 40 suits, 150 pairs of shoes, 200 dresses, at least 300 hats. She never has gloves washed, just tosses them away after...
...danger of extreme Romanticism is, as Cervantes showed, that it is apt to seem highly comical-and this is why comedy clings closely to everything that Victor Hugo did. Cold-shouldered by his wife, he chose as his mistress the courtesan Juliette Drouet. In return for his ecstasy, Hugo made Juliette respectable. He confined her to her room (for ten years she was never allowed to leave it except on his arm), and made her sell all her pretty clothes and underwear. "A bowl of food, a kennel and a chain-that is my lot," said Juliette. But she worshiped...
...theatrical has-beens and wouldbes of Rome's fleabag Hotel Imperatore, the Countess Sanziani exudes the imposing aura of a famed once-was. For La Sanziani. as Carmela soon learns, was once a legendary courtesan, mistress of a d'Annunzio-like poet, playmate of a Dutch multimillionaire, brief bedfellow of the Kaiser and of many another great or near great. Carmela is too young to sense it, but the poignancy of the countess is that in her rage to relive these past love affairs, she is dueling with her last and most pressing suitor-death...
...Courtesan Marie Duplessis, the real Camille. "Seven gentlemen pooled their money to keep her, and each was given a separate night of the week to visit her. They symbolized their collective devotion by combining to present her with a magnificent dressing-table containing seven drawers." Marie was 18 and notorious when Alexandra Dumas the Younger fell in love with her. She warned him off bluntly: "[I am] a woman who spits blood and spends a hundred thousand francs a year." But young Dumas insisted-and one year later tottered ruefully away, brokenhearted and loaded with debts...