Word: ra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lonely." It was a big week for Edis. Just a few nights before Thaïs, she had sung for the Paris Opéra's younger and less gaudy sister, the Opéra-Comique. It was a performance to deter anyone with a less unrelenting ambition. In the heat and humidity, the Opéra-Comique's production of La Traviata was so languid that it threatened to expire with each bar. The tenor bleated woefully and the rest of the cast missed cues and acted with the decisiveness of a group of tourists lost...
Back in Paris after the war, she sneaked backstage between acts of La Bohème at the Opéra-Comique and buttonholed balding Georges Hirsch, head of national French opera houses, told him: "Mr. Rouché thought I would be a wonderful Thaïs." Hirsch was flummoxed. He had never heard of her, and he had taken Jacques Rouché's place, when Rouché was removed as a collaborator. "Does Madame suggest an audition?" asked Hirsch politely. "No," said Edis, "Madame suggests a rehearsal of Manon." She got the rehearsal...
...arrival of Milan's famed La Scala opera company set critics to reminiscing fondly of the days when Arturo Toscanini was in the pit, and Caruso, Scotti and Sembrich were on the stage. Nothing about Paris' own two forlorn companies, at the Opera and the Opéra-Comique, was of the sort to bring up such memories...
...Bloy brought into the Roman Catholic fold many an apostate or proselyte to whom the church's more official voices had sounded too worldly and well-fed. One convert was the Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain. In 1905, Maritain, then a God-seeking philosophy student, and his young wife, Raïssa, visited Léon Bloy for the first time. They found in him the spiritual inspiration they had been looking...
Just published is a collection of Bloy's writings (Pilgrim of the Absolute, Pantheon, $3.50), edited by Raïssa Maritain, with an introduction by her husband, now France's Ambassador to the Vatican. The loving and loathing in these fragments might well prove a shock treatment for some torpid Christians. Excerpts...