Word: gilda
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...debuts this season of Anna Moffo, Eileen Farrell and Leontyhe Price, the Metropolitan Opera last week introduced Manhattan audiences to yet another fine American soprano-Hartford-born Gianna D'Angelo. Soprano D'Angelo, 31, made her debut portraying one of the silliest of all operatic heroines, Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto. But she triumphed over the role with such apparent ease that by evening's end she was firmly fixed as one of the Met's most promising sopranos...
...swayed in a rising fog of tobacco smoke and perfumed ether. On the floor below, three dance bands, thousands of voices, brigades of clinking bottles and the hypnotic hop of feet endlessly sambaing built a solid wall of sound. In the midst of the jammed dancers, 24-year-old Gilda Lopes, clad in a Queen of Sheba wisp of gauze and sequins, shimmied deliriously on a table top, drinking in masculine ogles as a parched field drinks the spring rain. She lost not a beat as she explained her costume: "It's like the one Lollobrigida wore...
...snatch of opera in the style of Mozart: "Susanna, I have something terrible to tell you/I've just been talking to the butcher/And he tells me/That the price of chicken has gone up three cents a pound!" For Italian-opera lovers he repeats the sequence in Verdian style ("Gilda! II prezzo di polio"), and for unabashed German romantics a snatch of Wagner ("Ach, was ward mir heut' angetan...
...those bright years of the boom, Gilda's private life could not keep up with her public success. She had married at eleven, borne a son at twelve, and she was deserted by the time she was 14. She married her manager, one Gil Boag, in 1924, and was divorced again in 1929. She tried once more in 1933 with a Venezuelan diplomat named Hector Briceno de Saa. That marriage ended...
More Fun. By then the shimmy was something that belonged to the past, along with speakeasies and a stock market where anybody could cash in. Gone, too, were Gilda's fortune and her health. She filed a petition in bankruptcy and went out to Colorado to pull herself together on a friend's ranch. Later, there were a few moments of notoriety: she stirred up the town of Sterling, Colo, by consenting to appear at a high school dance; she sued Columbia Pictures for a million dollars, claiming that the movie Gilda was an invasion of her privacy...