Word: opera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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First, audiences crammed into Tangle-wood's tiny opera theater to see the first U.S. performance of Benjy's fourth opera Albert Herring (TIME, June 30, 1947), which is already a favorite of English audiences and many English critics...
...story was familiar, at least in outline: Librettist Eric (Let's Make an Opera) Crozier had freely adapted his comic libretto from Guy de Maupassant's Le Rosier de Madame Husson. A bumpkin is chosen King of the May because in the village there is no girl virtuous enough to be Queen, eventually winds up on a roaring toot. To this, Composer Britten hitched a witty, somewhat Peter and the Wolf-ish score, in which each instrument seemed to portray (or mock) a character on stage. There were other Britten trademarks: well-fitting songs and exciting ensembles. Even...
...sneering Manhattan intellectuals to a self-analyzing jelly, Divver believed, or thought he believed, in Freud and historical Forces; his misery reached brilliant heights as he talked his first marriage to death. He went abroad to study life under Fascism, and found significance in everything from prostitutes to opera. Wrote Divver in his notebook...
...Opera composer views life from standpoint at odds with history. Knows work is artificial, ludicrous, does not care, or cannot help self . . . Soviet love of ballet quite different-freedom of movement, jumping, aspiring, etc. Probably otherwise under Czar." But such happy jottings were soon to be interrupted. At a mass press conference with Mussolini, Divver was jostled accidentally and raised a protesting voice; he was ejected, shouting and waving his fist, and at once became a hero back home. Too cowardly to refuse his accidental fame, Divver became Forward's expert on Italian affairs. Practice...
Married. Don Jaime, 41, Duke of Segovia, second son and onetime heir apparent of ex-King Alfonso XIII of Spain (deposed 1931, died in exile 1941), who renounced his claim to the throne in 1933; and Charlotte Tiedemann, German opera singer; in Innsbruck, Austria. Born a deaf mute into a family racked by the "Bourbon curse" of hemophilia, Don Jaime learned to talk intelligibly in three languages, remains healthy...