Word: gluck
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...disorderly world is the Lower Slobbovian Bald Iggle, the gentle-looking bird that fixes a maddening, sad-eyed stare upon anybody who tells a lie. If Lower Slobbovia really existed and the U.S. needed an ambassador there, Washington would do well to send Manhattan Dress Merchant Maxwell Henry Gluck. Of all the foreign diplomats in Lower Slobbovia, Max Gluck alone would be so honest that he would run into no trouble with Bald Iggles...
...first, on the 18th century's musical scene, Christoph Willibald Gluck seemed just another run-of-the-court opera composer. The threadbare romantic plots he used served mainly to give virtuoso singers something on which to string their purple-beaded arias. But Gluck became known as a daring revolutionary in 1762 when he wrote Orfeo ed Euridice, a work free of such "disfiguring abuses" as stock romantic situations and metaphorical arias. For years, he preached the virtues of Greek naturalism. After Gluck's death, better composers than he utilized some of his reforms, while Orfeo all but disappeared...
...recordings of Orpheus and Eurydice break with tradition by casting a male singer as Orpheus, normally sung by a contralto. (Gluck himself wrote the role for a male contralto, later rearranged it for tenor in Paris, where castrati singers were frowned upon.) Of the two versions, Epic's (in French) is more authentic historically, but less effective, chiefly because Canadian Tenor Leopold Simoneau's silver-hued voice seems less moving in the role of the suffering Orpheus than the lyric baritone of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, imaginatively cast by Decca in its German-language version. The supporting casts...
Hattie and Rose went into business together (Hattie made hats to go with Rose's dresses), moved to an uptown shop above a delicatessen and a Chinese restaurant. Their only advertising was Hattie herself, but it was enough. Soon Soprano Alma Gluck, Mrs. William Randolph Hearst Sr. and other fashionable ladies were standing patiently for fittings in the mingled aroma of chop suey and lox. In 1919, after a quarrel, Hattie bought out her partner, and later moved to the present, world-famed Carnegie salon on Manhattan's East 49th Street. The same year, she made her first...
...book that makes it less remote is Mozart, by Marcia Davenport, first published in 1932 and now reissued (Scribner; $6). Author Davenport, daughter of famed Soprano Alma Gluck, writes honestly, if often sentimentally, and with style about "one of the world's best-loved immortals...