Word: lucrezia
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...inside is rotting at the core. Raised as a bluestocking, Micol quips to Giorgio that she's writing her thesis on Emily Dickenson, "a dried-up spinster like me." Minutes later, in giving him a mock botany lesson, she points to a tree she imagines planted by Lucrezia Borgia. The connotations of that name reveal in her no dried-up spinster, but the malevolence of cruel sexuality. All her dewyeyed clinging to a golden past is merely the weapon she uses to emasculate Giorgio's overworshipful maleness at the altar of a bitchgoddess. Not only cold, she is consciously evil...
Because their motives and personalities are less obscured by distracting flamboyance, it is the women-the ones who loved the scoundrels-who emerge, almost subliminally, as the book's most understandable human beings. Lucrezia Borgia, unjustly slandered as a poisoner and profligate, seems much to be pitied -a woman who may have had a lover or two but who gave her third husband at least seven children before her death at 39. Only a few women railed at their fate. Beatrice d'Este Sforza, pregnant and angered at her husband's open infidelity with...
...tantalizing Madonna Lucrezia seems proof against procreation, she is nonetheless a setup for seduction. Espoused by an insufferable clod who wants to get her with child but cannot, she falls prey to a heated young gallant (Philippe Leroy) who merely wants to get her to bed and does. The lover presses his suit with life-or-death urgency, disguising himself as the luckless lout who is supposed to perish by black magic after Lucrezia has downed a potion brewed of mandragola, or mandrake root, and spent the night with him. Once conquered, Lucrezia cherishes...
...theater until a few minutes before curtain time. Then, "before 1 have time to think about it-pfft! I jump right in there." Last April, seemingly from out of nowhere, she jumped right in as a substitute to sing the lead in the American Opera Society's Lucrezia Borgia and pfft! She caused a sensation the likes of which Manhattan opera lovers have not witnessed since the arrival of Joan Sutherland four years...
Record companies are understandably annoyed. This spring, for example, after Spanish Soprano Monserrat Caballe made her widely acclaimed U.S. debut in Lucrezia Borgia, RCA Victor quickly signed her to make a recording of the opera. But not quickly enough. A black-market version of her debut was already selling briskly for $25. Artists, who naturally get no royalties from the piratings, are equally irritated. Mezzo-Soprano Regina Resnik, rummaging through a record bin a few years ago, was startled to hear a recording of Wagner's Ring cycle, whose label listed a cast of singers and an opera company...