Word: opera
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Alban Berg was a composer who rode to fame on only one work. His great, gloomy atonal opera, Wozzeck, is seldom performed, but it put his name in the musical history books...
Berg died at 50, in 1935. Besides Wozzeck, he left a nearly finished second opera, a brilliant violin concerto and a handful of other pieces. Last week, a Manhattan audience-heard the first U.S. performance in years of his Chamber
...with the proceeds of Wozzeck. Once when a reporter wrote that he was "neglected and starving," Berg called up a friend: "It is necessary that tonight we starve better than usual; come and starve with us." They ate at one of Vienna's best restaurants. With his second opera, Lulu, unfinished, he died of blood poisoning...
Jimmy's father, a Boston Irishman, wanted his son to become a plumber. ("I can still fix a toilet," says Jimmy.) Instead, he got what he thought was a wonderful job as office boy at the Boston Opera House: "There must have been 50 pianos!" With 50 pianos to tinkle on, he began making up his own tunes...
...probably the vagaries of the undress-for-pay profession that drove her to the opera. "Do you know," she indignantly exclaimed, "that they wouldn't let me perform in Providence, even with my clothes...