Word: rakingly
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...Stop the Rake-Offs. Key parts of the plan...
...Investigation of Communist-operated trading companies which have been doing business with Iron Curtain countries and paying a fat rake-off (estimated by Scelba at $45 to $50 million a year) to the Italian Communist treasury. Presumably the investigation will be followed by measures to stop, if not the trade, at least the rake-offs, thus depriving Palmiro Togliatti's comrades of a fat revenue source. ¶ Government seizure of property formerly owned by Mussolini's Fascists and seized by the Communists after the Allied liberation. Up to now, it has been allowed to stay in Red hands...
Next day Poland's official press cheered the death verdict and pointed the moral with a Rake's Progress report of what happens to those who follow Western ways: "The twin phenomena that we know as Bikinism and hooliganism in recent weeks have reached the proportions of a plague. The trial showed what happens when encroachment of Bikinism upon a section of the youth is tolerated and not stamped out as an enemy ideology smuggled into Poland by imperialist agents...
Your report of the "fiasco" of The Rake's Progress in its second season at the Metropolitan Opera [TIME, Feb. 8] underlines a circumstance that has long been obvious: Met audiences are not responsive to novelty, good or bad . . . The audiences, for the most part, prefer to listen to Carmen or Traviata for the hundred-and-umpteenth time. Or do they actually listen, even to their favorites? Isn't it rather a matter of going to the opera house to be pleasurably stroked, as it were, by a succession of familiar sounds...
Next night the Met gave its sixth performance (in two years) of the only contemporary composition in its repertory, Igor Stravinsky's Rake's Progress, which has cost the Met more than 60,000 hard-won dollars to mount. Reported Critic Olin Downes of the Times: "The opera suffered the worst fiasco that we have seen occur at the Metropolitan in 30 years of attendance there." Only a slim crowd turned up in the first place, and "by the end of the second act, people were leaving in scores ... It is clear that the public has tired...