Word: empresse
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...tung. Every week brings a graphic new twist to the pictorial record of her wicked ways. As the leader of the radical "Gang of Four"* accused of attempting to seize power after Mao's death last September, Chiang Ch'ing is pictured as a scheming empress of days long past. Alternatively she is depicted as a treacherous snake in woman's dress, a harridan spitting venom and a wily warrior wielding a spiked club. Perhaps most shocking to the puritanical Chinese are caricatures of Chiang Ch'ing as a trollop. In one of many variants...
Other less political charges against Chiang Ch'ing were calculated to shock the puritanical and egalitarian People's Republic. Madame Mao's personal life was said to be like that of the 7th century Empress Wu, notorious for her extravagance and lubricity. Accordingly, Chiang Ch'ing ordered every insect killed and every leaf dusted by her minions before she would venture to visit a Canton botanical garden. During bouts of insomnia, the imperious lady issued orders that work at a nearby noisy shipbuilding factory be stopped. So sensitive was she to noise that she once ordered...
...sopranos may well be little-known French operas. Along with one fragile masterpiece, Manon, Jules Massenet wrote several operas that fit this description. After 87 years, one of them, Esclarmonde, has just made its Metropolitan Opera debut as a vehicle for Joan Sutherland. The title character is a Byzantine Empress with magical powers, and after hearing the music, one can only wish that she had used her sorcery to summon up a different show-Rigoletto, maybe...
...wife Joan Sutherland's extraordinary voice. There are few coloratura fireworks in Esclmonde. One hears instead her middle-high range - lustrous, dusky, moving seamlessly between registers. No other singer could bring this music so close to distinction. Among the other principals, Mezzo Huguette Tourangeau, as the Empress' sister, sang with impeccable French style. The sets by Beni Montresor consist mostly of scrims and drops on which light shows swirl. To fashion his opulent costumes, the garment district must have emptied its bins of beads...
...year-old Emperor and Empress Nagako, 73, were lauded by a select audience of 7,500 in an hour-long ceremony at Tokyo's flower-bedecked Nihon Budokan (Martial Arts) Hall. In the half-century since the accession, Japan had been atom-bombed into defeat and had risen again to become one of the world's proud industrial powers. Hirohito, who renounced his divinity in the wake of Japan's World War II loss, is now the world's second-longest-reigning monarch. Swaziland's King Sobhuza II, who became King in 1921, has ruled...