Word: primas
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...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...
Last week, in the temperamental tradition of opera's prima donnas, Miss Nilsson did indeed walk out on the Met. She not only refused to sing as Brünnhilde in the 1970 premiere of the new Von Karajan production of Götterdämmerung, but also canceled her scheduled performances next season in Ariadne auf Naxos. Her reason: the Met was letting that nasty Von Karajan whittle down the number of her performances in order to introduce a younger Viennese protegee, Soprano Helga Dernesch, to New York audiences. "When the birds are not happy," throbbed Miss Nilsson...
Divorced. By George Balanchine, 65 master choreographer and artistic director of the New York City Ballet Company for 20 years: Tanaquil LeClerq, 39, onetime prima ballerina who, after becoming Balanchine's fifth wife, was forced to give up dancing forever when she contracted polio in Copenhagen in 1956; on uncontested grounds of incompatibility; after 16 years of marriage, no children; in Juárez, Mexico...