Word: opera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...cousin, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had seen the job through. To celebrate the opening, the Khedive had brought together 500 of the best cooks and 1,000 servants from Marseille, Trieste and Genoa. For the diversion of the expected guests, an open-air opera house had been built near the Great Pyramid; corps de ballet and singers by the dozen were imported, and the great Verdi commissioned to write an opera. (He responded with Aïda, but alas, two years too late...
Metropolitan Opera (Sat. 2 p.m., ABC). Verdi's Aïda, with Ljuba Welitsch...
Whispering Smith* (Paramount) is a standard horse opera, in Technicolor, full of fights, gunplay, chases, and the wholesome passion of a clean-cut Ladd (Alan) for a Good Woman (Brenda Marshall). The complicating fact is that Brenda is married to Alan's old friend (Robert Preston). But Preston develops a taste for too much liquor, too many women and two evil companions (Donald Crisp and Frank Faylen...
...five years ago, with George Szell in the pit, and Soprano Lily D janel swirling Salome's seven veils, the Met had been unable to get the right conductor-singer team together to do it again, and do it well. And with New York's upstart City Opera Company getting bravos for its lively, scaled-down production (TIME, Dec. 13), the Met knew that if it revived Salome at all, it would have to be mighty good...
...Europe last summer, General Manager Edward Johnson* thought he had found the right singer: magenta-mopped Bulgarian Soprano Ljuba Welitsch, of the Vienna State Opera. Last spring, when pudgy little Fritz Reiner left the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in a huff, Johnson knew he could get the right conductor, too. Even 84-year-old Composer Strauss agreed with that. From Montreux, Switzerland, he wrote to Reiner, who had first conducted Salome under his stern gaze in Dresden 33 years ago: "That is good news. There are plenty of others who can do Brahms and Bruckner. Opera needs men like...