Word: rinaldo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dragons & Drama. Handel was just 26 on the February day in 1711 when his first opera for an English audience-Rinaldo-opened at the Queen's Theater in the Haymarket. The son of a German barber-surgeon, Handel had left his home town of Halle at 18, had spent three years in Italy schooling himself in opera and oratorio. On his first visit to England, he patched Rinaldo together in a scant two weeks. Based on the poem by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), the opera was derided by Addison in The Spectator for its "Painted dragons spitting wildfire...
...thought I would go mad," she says. Instead, she went to Florence and joined a strict cloistered order, the Benedictines of Vallombrosa. After a seven-year novitiate, she took her "perpetual" vows in 1950. The same year, she had a visit from a thin man who had suffered much-Rinaldo...
...Rinaldo had fallen sick, served time in prison camps, fought with the partisans, been invalided at war's end to hospitals in northern Italy. When he returned to Falciano and found Alba gone, her family told him she had married and moved to Belgium. But Rinaldo continued the search and found her at last, only to hear her tell him through the convent grating: "I love you no more. I have said goodbye to the world...
...Rinaldo came back-on visit after visit for seven years. And for seven years Alba told Rinaldo it was no use. But she kept thinking about Rinaldo in her long hours of prayer and at her manual labor and her meager meals...
...refused to see Rinaldo until she was released from her vows* by special papal dispensation. Last week Onetime Nun Alba was settling down with her husband Rinaldo in a three-room flat in the Tuscan village of San Romano. "Just think of it," wrote the weekly Settimo Giorno, "a happy ending...