Word: mets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gertrude Stein impressed me as a woman who was very careless about her appearance and dress; very alive to all kinds of interests and liable to question the viewpoints of her instructors. She was very fond of Mrs. Oppenheimer (through whom Mr. Friedman met the Steins), who was a very motherly woman and took both Gertrude and Leo under her wing, had them at her house quite a little, and fed them more lavishly than the way in which they were living in Cambridge at the time...
Recent criticism by American educators of efforts toward establishing nationwide student testing programs for college met with varied response from University officials yesterday...
...witches' cancan in the first scene. The libretto (by Verdi, put into verse by Francesco Piave) dimly reflects some of the original's greatness, but it is far behind Librettist Arrigo Boito's Otello and Falstaff, and is essentially a choppy, ill-balanced synopsis. The Met's production, while brilliant in most respects, was faulted by some ludicrous details and a kind of Teutonic touch that is alien both to Verdi's Italian music and to Shakespeare's Scottish setting...
German Director Carl Ebert, general manager of West Berlin's Municipal Opera, superbly handled his cast and particularly the Met's often heavy-footed chorus, achieved some stunning, stylized patterns reminiscent of Bayreuth. Highly effective were the glowingly expressionistic sets by German Designer Caspar Neher, but his costumes were merely foolish: mauve, mustard, rose and lavender, suitable for a Todd A-O musical version of the Wars of the Roses. If Designer Neher tried to follow the romantic music by being deliberately unrealistic, he spoiled his effect with just enough realistic touches, as when platoons of soldiers...
...part of Lady Macbeth, which was to have been sung by Maria Callas before Rudolf Bing fired her (TIME, Nov. 17), went to radiant Viennese Soprano Leonie Rysanek, who in her Met debut showed off an unusually pure and beautifully rounded voice and considerable acting talent. Her only fault was that she scarcely fitted Verdi's bill ("I would have Lady Macbeth ugly and wicked ... her voice should be that of a devil"). For the most part, Soprano Rysanek seemed more like an ambitious Org Man's tender helpmate than a driven woman goading her weak husband...