Word: prima
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...British Physicist Otto Frisch once said: "Uranium is a prima donna difficult to seduce." While other European nations incorporated American expertise into their atomic power industries, France under Charles de Gaulle proudly clung to its own nuclear technology. The country's four atomic power plants use natural uranium, the only nuclear fuel available to France in large amounts. The least fissionable of atomic fuels, natural uranium requires costly installations. The system has been a technical success but an economic failure. Says Marcel Boiteux, general manager of Electricité de France, the state-controlled power network: "The cost of electricity...
Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele may be an exception. Toscanini admired it. Great bassos love to strip to the waist and storm through it. Famous prima donnas long to play at being beautiful and abandoned in it. The Metropolitan Opera has hinted at doing it for decades, but when the New York City Opera presented it last week, it was the first time that New Yorkers were able to see the opera performed with full stage trappings in 43 years...
...Famous prima donnas are apt to regard a bout with contemporary opera as roughly equivalent to a gargle with sulphuric acid. Modern composers, singers say, don't know how to write. They ruin voices by demanding odd and un-vocal sounds. Though this attitude is widespread, there is evidence that it is less a matter of fact than fashion. Birgit Nilsson, though she sings no contemporary opera at all, points out that composers are usually ahead of performers. Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, she observes, was abandoned as un-performable, "yet nowadays no dramatic soprano can be considered...
...exotic creatures. Nowhere have they been more clearly categorized as-such than in Cincinnati, where for the past 49 years Verdi and Bizet have been performed outdoors in the city zoo-joined, and sometimes drowned, by more basic animal noises from lions, seals, bears, elephants, peacocks and other prima donnas of the animal kingdom...
Both works featured the company's prima ballerina, Brazilian-born Marcia Haydee, 29, a dancer of stunning technique with the rare ability to turn the simplest body movement into a full statement. Touchingly simple as the lovelorn Russian girl who draws strength from rejection, deliciously rambunctious as Shakespeare's ultimately tamed volcano, Haydee is to the dance what Maria Callas has been to opera. She is an artist incapable of a dull or empty gesture, able to communicate a state of mind through an impressive range of movement or even by standing still. Her frequent partner is California...