Word: exits
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mechanized Corrida Over the centuries, a system has been developed in Spain for getting bulls who will not fight out of the bull ring. Usually, a few steers driven into the arena will herd the reluctant bull to the exit. Sometimes, men were sent in with long clubs to break the bull's legs so that he could be hauled out by mules. Or the peones, or the matador himself, would lure the bull up to the inner fence where an accomplice could jab a dagger into the base of his skull. In Madrid, as a last resort...
Prima Donna Maria Callas, past mistress of the grand operatic exit, did it again last week. After her closing performance in Bellini's Il Pirata, she stalked out of Milan's La Scala-for good, she said-and probably out of Italian opera as well. "I leave La Scala with deep pain," she said. "It is no longer compatible with my dignity as a woman and an artist...
Soprano Callas' exit looked to some operagoers like a retreat in her six-year-old war against Soprano Renata Tebaldi. Callas won the first battle in 1955, when her rival disappeared from La Scala; Tebaldi has not sung there since. But while Tebaldi began a brilliant new career at Manhattan's Met, her fans made things hot for Callas in Milan. When hissing Tebaldi rooters pelted Callas with radishes, Manager Antonio Ghiringhelli put up to 150 cops into La Scala, soothed Callas with public kisses and bales of flowers...
...Callas. "I sing only for artistic reasons; it is not my custom to sing against anybody," she said. Groaned Manager Ghiringhelli: "This is a stab in the back." To some critics and subscribers, a Scala with no top diva seemed a disaster. Others considered the price well worth the exit of Callas. "She corrupts public taste," cried the Giorno critic. "She lowers the noble assembly of the theater to the level of an arena...
...only intensified by the fact that male admirers fairly swarmed around both of them-readily swooning when the "dazzling Juliette" draped her graceful neck around a harp and plucked a few plangent twangs, readily reaching for underdoses of poison when frustrated amour demanded the appearances ol a tragic exit...