Word: maria
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...Cleopatra in Julius Caesar. Starting this week she and the New York City Opera will recreate all three during a three-week guest stand in Los Angeles (planned for next spring is a new production by Beverly and the company of another Donizetti queen, Maria Stuarda). Early next month, she will give two performances of Lucia di Lammermoor in New Orleans, then fly to Israel for a month-long concert tour. After that, her appointment book lists dates as far ahead...
...great opera houses, from La Scala to Covent Garden to San Francisco, commanded top fees of $10,000 for concert performances and made recordings that turned into classical bestsellers. She became a $300,000-a-year, one-woman industry and, at the same time, the finest singing actress since Maria Callas. And because she did so as a thoroughly home-grown talent, she revolutionized the U.S. opera scene. In short, she became Beverly Sills...
What Beverly has shown since 1966 is that an American singer can take up where Maria Callas left off. Callas, now virtually retired, had a soaring, flexible voice that projected a matchless dramatic intensity. In the 1950s, among other roles, she almost singlehanded revived the ornate bel canto repertory of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. (Bel canto, literally "beautiful singing," more properly applies to the whole vocal art of making the fiendishly difficult sound easy.) It is this repertory that Beverly and her chief coloratura rival, Joan Sutherland (see box, page 81), have since then mastered. Beverly comes...
BESIDES Beverly Sills, the other leading heiress to Maria Callas' artistic legacy is the Australian coloratura soprano Joan Sutherland. Sutherland, 45, sings many of the same roles as Sills and, like Sills, was a late bloomer-she burst onto the international scene with a Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden in 1959. Otherwise the two are a study in contrasts: separate conjugations of greatness. Each has her passionate following. Ask a Sutherland admirer about Sills' voice and he might say, "Pretty, but thin." Ask a Sillsian about Sutherland and he might retort, "Beautiful, but boring." Still, all would...
...called Trout Fishing in America. The main character was Trout Fishing itself-among the cleanest and most refreshing combinations of words in English. Unfortunately, this personification of a peerless gerund suffered a surrealistic metamorphosis that included its becoming a pen point, a legless alcoholic and a dinner companion of Maria Callas. At the end, Trout Fishing wound up in a junkyard as a used stream, for sale by the foot...