Word: opera
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...scrawny, 17-year-old boy with a strong British accent got his first job as floor sweeper and general retoucher in the Chicago lithographic firm of Shober & Carqueville. A year later he was a scene painter for the Chicago Opera, priming the enormous backdrops with a large brush dipped in glue. This job he attacked so earnestly that at the end of his first day's work he fell in a dead faint on the floor. His name was Albert Sterner, born a U. S. citizen, in England, of naturalized parents...
...company was born out of rebellion and dissatisfaction, in the summer of 1934. Our rebellion was against conventional opera, conventionally produced and enslaved by the star system. Our hope was to introduce the arts of the theatre into opera from which they have been divorced, these many years, all over the world. Toscanini, Klemperer, Stefan Zweig and Ernst Krenek listened to our declarations. A proclamation of artistic independence was drawn up and subscribed to by these men. They all signed it. and Toscanini remarked: 'Nothing is ever being done for the real opera-only words, never action. But perhaps...
Thus does a young Viennese named Paul Csonka, who assembled a troupe of young singers in 1934, explain what he set out to do. For six months in a quiet Tyrolese village his troupe rehearsed one opera, Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. After a season in Vienna, Csonka moved it to Salzburg, though it had no connection with the summer music festivals, and adopted the name, Salzburg Opera Guild. Last summer, rehearsing twelve hours a day in a rented castle at Mondsee near Salzburg, the Guild increased its repertory of operas. Last week, under the management of astute...
...smooth. skin-tight trunks in my third-act costume.... I knew that four of my beaus were in the audience. Each one had carefully let me know where he would be sitting. The impulse to play a little joke on them all was too much for me. As the opera went on, I proceeded to sing passionately to each in turn.... I preferred roles that allowed me to make a feature of my curves, since, apparently, I couldn't avoid having them. . . . King Edward induced me to try to play golf. . . . But after a few trials I found...
...operatic divas go, one in which the author admits she is plump, is not too boastful about herself or too jealous of her peers, is on its face noteworthy. Such a volume (ghosted by Dorothy Giles) is Men, Women and Tenors* by Frances Alda. Long a capable Metropolitan Opera Soprano, first wife of Impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Mme Alda launches her book with much of the triumphant, glassy-smiling air of a diva squaring off at a high C. Says her introduction: "For 50 years (everyone from the radio announcer to the Motor License Bureau knows...