Word: igor
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...under the patronage of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovitch, Diaghilev opened his first season of dance in Paris. The jaded city was ripe for an invasion of exotica. His company, to the frenzied rhythms of the Polovtsian dances from Borodin's Prince Igor, swept Paris like a Mongol invasion. Next came Scheherazade, with its orgy of writhing dancers, the extraordinary half human, half feline Golden Slave portrayed by Nijinsky, and the unexpected colors of Bakst. That was succeeded by the most famous opening-night brawl in history, when a glittering crowd booed Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Nijinsky...
Three of opera's "great progressivists," Igor Stravinsky once declared, were Gluck, Wagner-and the Viennese modernist Alban Berg. Stravinsky was not being merely provocative. As the years go by, Berg's claim to belong in such illustrious company looks more and more secure. It rests on two complex, powerful works, Wozzeck and Lulu, that in effect brought opera into the 20th century. Lulu, in particular, packed traditional operatic emotion and drama into the most advanced of forms, the twelve-tone system devised by Berg's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg...
...more facts are emerging about the Shadrin case, and they make it seem every bit as complicated and cold-blooded as a John Le Carré plot. TIME has learned that in 1966 a KGB agent known as Igor was posted as a diplomat to the Soviet embassy in Washington. In an extraordinarily straightforward way, he phoned the home of CIA Director Richard Helms and talked to his then-wife Julia. Igor offered to become a double agent, or, in Le Carré's famous term, a "mole," who would burrow deeply into the Soviet espionage network and pass...
...Igor told the Americans that he could possibly get a higher post within the KGB. He said he would have a better chance of this if he could recruit Shadrin as a Soviet agent. U.S. intelligence officials, though suspicious, decided to help. Thus, even before the KGB got in touch with Shadrin, he had been persuaded by U.S. officials to become a double agent, despite considerable misgivings on his part...
Vera Stravinsky, Igor's widow, on celebrities: "People ask me about famous people. I always say I knew only...