Word: dido
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...young Benjamin Britten's admirers acclaim him as the wonder boy who will restore the glitter to opera's tarnished tiara. In England, which has never produced a composer to match its poets and playwrights, critics call him the likeliest English opera discovery since Henry Purcell composed Dido and Aeneas for a girls' boarding school 250 years...
British catalogues are quite complete, with listings of most minor works and rare, hard-to-sell large sets such as Purcell's great opera. "Dido and Aeneas." With less spent on advertising and technicolor album covers, the British customer gets more for his money in finer records. We can only hope that the American industry will once again set its sights on the target of better records and will turn towards quality when it has sated its appetite for huge profits. It would be refreshing again to have music for music's sake the rule in the platter business...
...Jess Birdwell, Quaker and nurseryman. Jess thought he had everything life could give, except a chance to listen to music. His wife, Eliza, was a minister-"good-looking, as female preachers are apt to be." But like most of the local Quakers, Eliza believed that music was "a popish dido, a sop to the senses, a hurdle waiting to trip man in his upward struggle." She had to give Jess a pretty stern nudge in the ribs every seventh month, fourth day (Fourth of July), when Amanda Prentis hurdled the high notes of The Star Spangled Banner...
...table like an apple dumpling, Tom Paine was made to look as thin and mean as a sharp knife, the Royal Georges were shown with the complacently stupid expressions of goldfish, and Lord Nelson's beautiful mistress, Lady Hamilton, was portrayed as a coarse, fat, dowdy Dido (see cut), mourning among the souvenirs of her lover's Nile victory, when he sailed away to fight another round with Napoleon...
...early success was "Tom Thumb," given in 1854, in which Phillips Brooks took the part of the huge princess Glumdalka. Musical burlesques with piano accompaniment were later included in the repertoire, and the first full-fledged operetta was produced in 1882--"Dido and Aeneas." This work, based on the "Aeneid," a work which all the undergraduates had to know cold in those days, included both original and borrowed music and went as far afield as Philadelphia. In 1918, the first show on the modern, grand scale was produced--"Barnum Was Right." The author was Robert E. Sherwood...