Word: operatives
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Walter Felsenstein, 74, director of East Berlin's Komische Oper since 1947; of cancer; in East Berlin. One of the century's most influential operatic impresarios, Vienna-born Felsenstein was a demanding perfectionist who sometimes rehearsed for 36-hour stretches. Once, when a reluctant chorus member declined to jump from a 7-ft.-high perch, Felsenstein made the leap, broke his arm and returned 45 minutes later waving his cast and demanding "Now will you jump?" Felsenstein retained his Austrian citizenship and commuted daily from his home in West Berlin to the East, where he turned...
...joys of the occasion. Beverly Sills has made it to the stage of the Met at a time when the house needs a star of her talent and box office impact. On the way, she has been heard at such opera capitals as Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Deutsche Oper in Berlin, San Carlo of Naples, La Fenice in Venice, not to mention San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Houston and Cincinnati. There are no more debuts she needs to make, just new roles and unfamiliar music, which is what the saga of Beverly Sills is really all about anyway...
...White House Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig said that he had "heard" that "several sources" in the Administration had discussed the theory that Miss Woods could have acciden tally pressed the fast rewind pedal, which would erase the 18-minute seg ment in a few seconds. But that oper ation would have left a high-pitched whine on the tape, not the hum that is present, and would have required Miss Woods to have played the segment -as she testified she did not -before rewind ing and erasing...
Those familiar with Friedrich's background might have expected the unusual: an honored member of the East German Communist Party, he is deputy to the unorthodox Walter Felsenstein at the famed Komische Oper in East Berlin. Yet nobody seemed prepared for what appeared when Conductor Erich Leinsdorf lowered his baton for the overture. Tenor Hugh Beresford wandered over a barren wooden platform; instead of a balletic orgy, there was a huge human brain populated with frightening, dim figures miming psychiatric problems ranging from infantilism to sadomasochism. Venus arrived looking like a Reeperbahn stripper...
...finest of the opera films achieve theatrical effect by cinematic means. The Berlin Deutsche Oper's version of Hans Werner Henze's sardonic The Young Lord, for example, hits harder than would be possible in a stage production: In this grim fable, the citizens of a small town foolishly ape the eccentricities of what they believe to be a wealthy aristocrat; at the end they discover that the object of their idolatry is in fact a real ape. Stripped of pretense by the cruel joke, the people stare helplessly at the ape while the camera mercilessly moves from...