Word: sordello
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Driving back, it was dark and Alan recited from Browning's Sordello... The rest is history. I made an honest man of him two days later by the grave of a certain Letitia Forbes (1877-1879). My all but vanished menses made it into a kosher defloration. Alan was a miracle. Five times, Susan! And, naturally, he had memorized the Kama Sutra...
...Italian Industrialist Giovanni Meneghini, ticketed modestly as a tourist-class passenger, but described in a lawsuit earlier in the week by Maria as the man "who owns me as a husband." At the airport, Diva Callas bumped into another tourist-class passenger, none other than fur-collared Baritone Enzo Sordello, fired from the Met fortnight ago because, claimed Sordello, he had outsung Maria in an unaffectionate duet of Lucia di Lammermoor. In jolly holiday spirits, Sordello proffered a bygones-be-bygones handshake. Maria spurned his mitt and stalked off. Warbled she to newsmen a bit later: "I said, 'Merry...
...Metropolitan Opera. It began, more or less, during a matinee of Lucia di Lammermoor which was broad cast from coast to coast. Often Callas sang superbly, notably in the famous mad scene, but sometimes she sounded as shrill as static, and during her second-act duet with Baritone Enzo Sordello she dropped her highest note like a hot knife, while Baritone Sordello held his. What happened next could be the script for a third-rate opera buff...
...Sordello tells it, Callas grabbed him and whispered loudly: "Don't hold that note!" He held on for dear life. In the in termission. Callas told him: "You will never sing with me again." Then she canceled her next performance of Lucia, to put pressure on Manager Rudolf Bing to fire Sordello-or so Sordello says. Her failure to appear in Lucia caused a near riot of disappointed ticket holders who had to be quieted by the cops. And two days later, Sordello got a registered letter from Manager Bing dismissing him from the Met. "Miss Callas," Sordello summed...
Callas agrees that Sordello did indeed hold the high note, and that during intermission she told him "it wasn't a nice thing to do." To which, said Diva Callas, he replied: " I am going to kill you'-meaning vocally, of course." She did not even mention the matter to Manager Bing, and canceled her performance because of a throat irritation. Harassed Manager Bing, firmly siding with Diva Callas, said Sordello had been fired solely because he had added extra embellishments and showy high notes to his part in Lucia, and, when reprimanded, had been "impertinent" to Conductor...