Word: schuylers
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Scrap Tristan and put on Tosca. At the Met-which has fielded three Tristans for an act apiece rather than switch operas for a single performance-it was a disastrous suggestion. Schuyler Chapin, Gentele's successor as manager, rejected the idea, hired a minor singer named Klara Barlow to sing Isolde, and pulled together cast and production...
...most intriguing early American politicians. Vidal takes the material at hand and succeeds in turning out a coherent, internally consistent narrative. He does so using an almost disjointed technique--developing the story of Burr's career simultaneously through "memoirs" attributed to Burr and through "research" supposedly conducted by Charles Schuyler, a young journalist and friend of Burr...
...disjointed narrative has its advantages. Schuyler's research is used to fill in Burr's background, to reveal little tidbits of bastardy that Burr could not plausibly put in his memoirs. More importantly, by purporting to include portions of Burr's own memoirs, Vidal can ascribe motives to Burr's activities throughout the man's public career...
...within a memoir, somewhat mechanical but well-suited to Vidal's didactic purposes. Only two characters are pure invention. William de la Touche Clancey is a mischievous and gratuitous bit of satire whom followers of Vidal's TV errors and trials should have little trouble identifying. Charlie Schuyler is, according to the author, a young opportunistic journalist "based roughly on the obscure novelist Charles Burdett." This is a flimsy bit of deception. Burdett was so obscure a novelist that he is not listed in any of the standard literary references. Historians, however, readily identify him as Burr...
...Charlie Schuyler's memoirs are considerably more omniscient than those of his obscure model. For they include Burr's own memoirs as dictated to Charlie, his would-be biographer. The Burr sections are Vidal's skillful précis of Aaron Burr's actual letters and diaries, containing intimate justifications for his adventures and intrigues. Burr, the sardonic wit, constantly sees through labels like Republican and Federalist to such common denominators as hunger for glory, power and the preservation of privilege. He talks of Washington's "eerie incompetence" as a military leader, while admiring...