Word: magda
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Menotti stretched his libretto and music around a situation of almost completely unrelieved pathos and tragedy. His heroine, Magda Sorel (Soprano Patricia Neway), applies for a visa to join her resistance-leader husband, who has been hounded out of his unnamed country by the secret police. "The Consul" himself never appears; his secretary chants a bored refrain to all comers...
Caught between red tape and secret police, the frantic Magda eventually turns on the gas in frustration and despair...
...stage directions-touches such as the smashing of a window-pane-startled listeners more than once. And he had not lost any of his flair for the macabre: in one scene, a magician hypnotizes his fellow visa-seekers, commands them into an eerie waltz in the consulate office. In Magda's dying dream, the same characters dance again in coffin clothes...
...European king and his mistress (not Carol and Magda, the author hastens to say) are passing their exile in Mexico City, eating high on the lotus as they await admission to the U.S. With them are the king's chamberlain, a villain as cold as a Danube carp, and a sadistic international financier, who keeps thin, boned whips in his bureau drawer...