Word: mordden
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ethan Mordden...
Every opera fan knows how high Tosca bounced, when the next swan left and what Maria Callas thought of Renata Tebaldi; disasters, bons mots and bitchy remarks seem integral to the art. Ethan Mordden, who knows his way around backstage (Demented: The World of the Opera Diva; The Splendid Art of Opera), has gleefully amassed hundreds of such anecdotes, exchanges and choice bits of opera lore, along with some less celebrated stories. "Yet there is history here," he says, "for if many of the tales are silly, many others are telling...
...SPLENDID ART OF OPERA by Ethan Mordden; Methuen; 413 pages...
...chief value of Ethan Mordden's The Splendid Art of Opera is in just such updatings, which are the results of exhaustive research. Unfortunately, Mordden, a former editor of Opera News, has a brass ear for language: one composer, he writes, "will have to wow 'em pronto." His book is less pleasurable than utilitarian, something to thumb through for answers rather than for diversion...