Word: marias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...prerogative of the autobiographer, Bing opts mostly for one side of the story-his. He says nothing of his glaring failure to bring Soprano Beverly Sills to the Met, for example, but grows highly petulant because she and the New York City Opera scheduled Donizetti's Tudor trilogy (Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena, Roberto Devereux) at the same time he was planning it at the Met for the Spanish prima donna Montserrat Caballé. "We finally accepted the fact that Beverly Sills of the City Opera, having been born in Brooklyn, was entitled to priority in the portrayal of British...
Despite his tiffs with Maria Callas (he fired her in 1959, re-engaged her in 1965 for two Toscas), Bing regards her Met debut in 1956 in Norma as "the most exciting of all such in my time at the Metropolitan." Bing also recalls Callas' husband and manager Battista Meneghini, who insisted on being paid in cash before the curtain rose every night. Callas' fee then was $1,000. "Toward the end," recalled Bing, "I had him paid in five-dollar bills, to make a wad uncomfortably large for him to carry...
...most other European countries already have one. But the VAT that Belgium introduced last year is the most complicated of all: it has four different rates, from 6% on food to 25% on liquor. Retailers angrily protest that the resulting paperwork is intolerable. Says Mrs. Maria Hendrickx, half of a husband and wife vegetable-selling team in Brussels: "My husband can buy vegetables in the market, but he can't fill in all those damned forms. He isn't clever enough." Another though unvoiced complaint of many shopkeepers: in Belgium, as in some other European nations, tax evasion...
...anyone who would laugh, gape or exploit him. Nevertheless he feels the urge to lead this uneducated herd to drink from the reservoir of great art. In concluding what is surely the most stylish lecture of his career, he quotes "Archaic Torso of Apollo," by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke...
...most bizarre occurrence, one which forced the rebels to move before they had planned, took place some 7000 miles away in the Carribean. Henrique Malta Galvao, a former colonial High Inspector and a staunch opponent of the then dictator Antonio de Oliveria Salazar, seized the Portuguese luxury liner Santa Maria," the second largest ship in the nation's merchant navy. Along with 68 men armed with machine guns. Galvao hijacked the ship after leaving Curacao with 600 passengers and 300 crew members aboard...