Word: opera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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They confiscated the estate of Baron George Daubek, central European representative of International Business Machines and husband of New York Metropolitan Opera Singer Jarmila Novotna; they announced that Daubek no longer had "an open protector" in the Czech cabinet. They did not say who the protector had been. The late Jan Masaryk had played piano accompaniments for Novotna on U.S. recordings of Czech folk songs...
...Neck. The London Handel moved to in 1712 was a bawdy place of brawling and bawling. Handel did well at court. Queen Anne, who had little use for musicians, pensioned him just to spite her Hanoverian cousins. Anne's successor, lumpish George I, attended almost all his operas with his favorite German mistress and her "two acres of cheeks ... an ocean of neck." The rest of London was more fickle. Addison, who had written an unsuccessful opera himself, denounced and ridiculed Handel's music. Handel's rival, the egocentric Giovanni Battista Bononcini, kept him fighting for audiences...
...time, Londoners were far more interested in the caperings of Handel's two leading prima donnas, Faustina and Cuzzoni, than in his music. Almost nightly at the opera house, heads were bashed, windows smashed. The cheers & jeers drowned out Handel's arias, while the two "fighting cats" scratched at each other's eyes and pulled at each other's hair...
...Handel's most powerful opponent was Frederick, Prince of Wales. He and his young friends, who scorned everything his father, George II, chose to favor, set up an Opera of the Nobility to rival Handel's theater. Handel's enemies organized bands of hoodlums to tear down his posters, gave parties on the nights of his oratorios to make sure no one would attend. Sometimes Handel played to nearly empty houses ("My music will sound the better so!" he snorted). Sometimes, the King and his party made up nearly the entire audience. Quipped Lord Chesterfield on leaving...
Take My Life (Rank; Eagle-Lion). An opera singer's husband is accused of strangling a former mistress; his wife (sumptuous Greta Gynt) finds out whodunit. This English thriller in the Hitchcock tradition is no world-shaker, but it is done with intelligence and a flair for fright...