Word: hamburger
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...while he was in pain. He suffered from an enlarged liver, hemorrhoids, recurrent eye infections, insomnia and boils. But Marx's bitter prophecy that the bourgeoisie would "have cause to remember my carbuncles" hardly applies today. Last week, on the 100th anniversary of the publication in Hamburg of the first, and most important, volume of Das Kapital, the only people who seemed to be in agony over Marx's ideas were his own Communist heirs...
...Directions. The Hamburg Opera's distinctive approach, which Germans call "realistic musical theater," is not often seen in America. Instead of featuring barnstorming stars with showy voices, the company uses lesser-known but accomplished singers (many of them American) who stay with the company throughout the ten-month season and blend smoothly into the overall musical texture. Instead of garnishing glorious music with pageantry and posturing, Hamburg produces cohesive, hard-hitting dramatic performances, in which the text is as important as the score. And instead of sticking with proven but sometimes flyblown versions of operatic warhorses, it mounts eight...
...Hamburg's approach sounds like a formula for box-office harakiri, but, as General Manager Rolf Liebermann says: "Our job is to try out new things and to find new directions. In such a context, a flop or a hit today is of no consequence whatever." In practice, the company has many more hits than flops, selling out a seasonal average of 86% of its 1,670 seats, attracting opera buffs from around the world to its occasional week-long programs of contemporary opera, and having its pick of top festival tours...
...composer, firmly controls quality by adjusting the tiniest strokes of stage business and watching nearly every performance. In the belief that "seduction of the audience through the eye is easier than through the ear," he has brought such gifted directors as Jean-Louis Barrault and GianCarlo Menotti to Hamburg to stage his productions; and as a musician, he has persuaded such fellow composers as Hans Werner Henze, Ernst Krenek and Krzystof Penderecki to write new operas for the company...
Proud as he is of Hamburg's 289-year operatic history, Liebermann is a manager who "hears ahead," in the words of one of his singers. Appropriately, six of the seven productions presented by the Hamburgers at the Met were written in the 20th century (as was a quarter of their entire repertory). "The moral and democratic responsibility of a music-theater manager," says Liebermann, "is to confront the public with its own times," not to preside over "an old, stinky museum...