Word: gattis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...praise Gatti-Casazza, the impossible has dawned. Last week, in an explosion of unabashed pride born of years of frustration, the Metropolitan Opera formally opened a stunning new $45.7 million house in Lincoln Center. And what a house to come home...
Fresh off the boat from Italy, gourd-shaped Giulio Gatti-Casazza heads straight for Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. As the newly appointed general manager of the Met, he is eager to have a look at his new home. Mama mia! What he sees is enough to curl his beard. It's bad enough that the exterior looks like a brewery. But the backstage area is so cramped that it can hardly accommodate a P.T.A. pageant. Principal singers, he finds to his horror, have to rehearse in the ladies' powder room; scenery is stacked behind the building...
That was in 1908. Gatti-Casazza stayed on for 27 years, waiting patiently-but his singers never got out of the powder room. Not that the management wasn't serious about that new house. Indeed, the Be-Patient-New-Met's-A-Comin' recitative echoed through the old house more regularly than the Anvil Chorus. At one time or another, sites for a new Met were planned on 49th Street, 57th Street, 59th Street, 63rd Street, 110th Street, Washington Square, on the ground floor of the Seagram Building and underneath the Queensboro Bridge...
Every year Metropolitan Opera General Manager Rudolf Bing, 64, edges closer to the record of Italian-born Maestro Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who ruled the house from 1908 to 1935. Last week Bing and the Met agreed that he should stay on through the 1970 season. That will give him 20 harrowing years...
...classically misspent life. Last week he died as he had lived - gorging himself on fine food with a willowy blonde at his side. The end came in Rome's Ile de France restaurant on the ancient Aurelian Way near Vatican City. Accompanied by blonde Anna Maria Gatti, 28, Farouk dined at midnight on oysters, roast lamb, cake and fruit. At 1:30 in the morning, as he enjoyed a postprandial cigar, Farouk said he felt faint, clutched at his throat and fell forward on the table. An ambulance was summoned and Farouk was placed in an oxygen tent...