Word: magda
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...first the opera does appear to be something of a rewrite. The story certainly recalls La Traviata: Parisian Courtesan Magda meets innocent Country Boy Ruggero, loves him and then, out of concern for his family's honor, leaves him. And as in La Bohème, there is a joyous café scene and a secondary pair of quarrelsome lovers. Yet the feel of La Rondine is very different, for Magda is a more worldly-wise heroine than either Violetta or Mimi. Her affair with Ruggero is a self-deluding attempt to recapture a lost moment from her youth...
Aside from a somewhat shaky performance from Rumanian-born Soprano Ileana Cotrubas, who sings Magda, the Lyric's handsome, glittering production is cast with young Americans. Originally presented in 1981 at Pisa's Teatro Comunale G. Verdi, it is directed by Giulio Chazalettes, who might have made more of Rondine's disillusioned subtext and in so doing brought out its richer texture. But as performers gradually realize the opera's possibilities, harder-edged interpretations will no doubt follow...
...long interval before the general returned with a Soviet rejection, Goebbels decided that he too must die. He ordered one of the bunker's doctors to inject sedatives into his six children, who had taken refuge with him in the bunker, then they were given poison. Goebbels' wife Magda bit on a cyanide pill, and Goebbels shot her in the back of the head. Then, just like Hitler, he raised his pistol to his own temple and fired...
...most brutal scene in the film is not one of the plentiful tableaus of pre-adolescent Hitler Youth committing suicide as the city falls, nor of limbs being sawed off without anesthetic in makeshift, underground hospitals, but of a steel-faced Magda Goebbels poisoning each of her six cherubic blonde children shortly before her own suicide—giving them their “salvation,†as she writes in a letter, because it is “no longer worth it to live in a world after National Socialism...
...film makes no further comment. It has not caricatured Magda, as it does, to a certain extent, caricature Joseph Goebbels. Between her six-victim murder and her suicide with her husband, we are given no further data to indicate how we should feel about an otherwise apparently loving mother capable of such brutality...