Word: norma
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...single copy, up to $25 for an album. For the Callas fan, for example, the catalogue lists her excellent 1958 performance of Medea with the Dallas Opera, taped by a college student who hid his microphone in the footlights, and a 1952 Covent Garden production of Norma, prized by collectors because the cast also featured a then unknown singer named Joan Sutherland...
...Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87) said that it was silly not to have "realistic" characters in opera-so he created Orfeo and Euridice, with their set, face-front arias. Bellini (1801-35) and Donizetti (1797-1848) thought Gluck's characters were insufficiently real-so they created the stylized Norma and Lucia. Wagner (1813-83) avowed the same sentiment-and created Lohengrin and his swan. Puccini (1858-1924) proclaimed a brand of truthfulness he called verismo -and created Turandot, the princess of a China that could never have existed anywhere...
...musical treatise on freedom, The Marriage of Figaro on the corruption of aristocracy, Don Carlos on the dilemmas of power. Opera plots and music are sexy. Most operatic heroines fail to wait for the wedding ceremony (Manon, Mimi, Tosca, Aïda, Carmen, Santuzza, Brünnhilde), and they (Norma, Marguerite, Sieglinde, Suor Angelica) have a lot of illegitimate children. Whatever one may think of the plots, one remembers the characters. Rigoletto may end up absurdly with the heroine killed by mistake and then carried in a sack by her own father, who thinks he is carrying the corpse...
Actresses have always counted their physical charms as attributes, but how much of them they revealed has varied vastly with the times. In the forgotten '20s, bosoms were sometimes bared in flickering film orgies; in the '30s, Norma Shearer in the sheerest of slips was enough to make temperatures simmer. World War II G.I.s strained at the sight of Lana Turner in a sweater. Then came Marilyn Monroe's enamel-textured calendar shot and Brigitte Bardict's nudity-with-towel, and most barriers were down...
When in Rome, she does as she always does. There were some boos after the first act of a gala opening-night Norma in 1958, and Soprano Maria Callas stomped out without further ado. So the Rome Opera canceled her contract for three additional performances. Their mistake. The reason for her hasty exit, said La Callas, was a sore throat, and a Roman court that examined her medical certificates agreed. The opera management now has to honor her original contract and pay the diva $2,800 for the operas she didn't sing. With Callas, even silence is golden...