Word: italian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...goes back even farther, to two Covent Gardens before it. In 1732 Actor John Rich, who had rented the site, a convent-garden, built a prose theater (its star playwrights: Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan). After a devastating fire, the theater was rebuilt in 1809, later named the Royal Italian Opera House. It featured not only opera but all-night masked balls whose patrons, wrote a shocked reporter, "were truly the disciples of the lewd fiend Belial." One gay dawn in 1856, the place burned down again, scattering and sobering the disciples...
Prima Donna Maria Callas, past mistress of the grand operatic exit, did it again last week. After her closing performance in Bellini's Il Pirata, she stalked out of Milan's La Scala-for good, she said-and probably out of Italian opera as well. "I leave La Scala with deep pain," she said. "It is no longer compatible with my dignity as a woman and an artist...
This season La Scala's new Artistic Director Francesco Siciliani began needling Ghiringhelli about pampering prima donnas. Even before Callas' celebrated walkout on a Rome audience including Italian President Gronchi last January (TIME, Jan. 13), Ghiringhelli pointedly skipped his ritual of meeting her at the airport with flowers...
Unwelcome in both Rome and Milan, too high-priced for other Italian cities, Callas faced a lucrative, popular future abroad-and the prospect of a new battleground. Next winter she will sing at Manhattan's Met, and so will Soprano Tebaldi...
...rest of the way home, across Poland and Germany, the roads were good and the food was fine. Italian Prince Scipione Borghese, captain of the Itala crew, led a triumphant parade into Paris to complete what he called "the amplest, the completest, the most persuasive testing to which this new instrument has ever been subjected." The trip had taken just two months...