Word: figaro
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Waiting in the wings for his entrance cue during a Metropolitan Opera performance of The Marriage oj Figaro last week, Tenor Charles Kullman (Don Basilic) suddenly realized that he was missing something: his voice. His vocal cords evidently affected by a lingering cold, Kullman rushed to the dressing room and started desperately croaking at Tenor Gabor Carelli, who was not scheduled to go on (in the role of Don Curzio) until the third act. Carelli looked up amiably from his newspaper. "Quit your kidding, Charlie," he said. When Kullman finally got his message across. Carelli hastily switched costumes and rushed...
...opera houses, was signed by the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1957. She had turned down two previous offers from the Met on the ground that the proposed schedule demanded too much of her time. (This season she will appear also in the Met's Faust and Marriage of Figaro...
...York Journal-American. "Non-Mozartean shenanigans," snorted Howard Taubman in the Times, while the Herald Tribune's Paul Henry Lang denounced it as "a travesty." Occasion: a new production, staged by Broadway's Cyril Ritchard, of Mozart's comic masterpiece, The Marriage of Figaro...
...with laughter. When the young page Cherubino pours out his adolescent romantic yearnings in Act I, he does so in Ritchard's version while holding on to a pair of women's drawers draped across a clothesline full of underthings. At the act's end, when Figaro mockingly congratulates Cherubino on his future military career, he punctuates the aria Non più andrai with a solid boot to the rump. But Ritchard's worst sin, according to the purist critics, was turning the Countess from a person of "breeding and dignity" into a delightfully sprightly lady...
Actually, the critics of the Met's new Figaro were on shaky ground; there is no evidence that Mozart, whose sense of humor was bawdy and mercurial, saw in Figaro anything but superb entertainment. Director Ritchard feels that even a Mozart opera should be theater, not merely oratorio, based his interpretation on a study of the original Beaumarchais play from which Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the libretto; Figaro, he thinks, is shot through with a kind of "Hogarthian exaggeration" too often muted by Mozart worshipers...