Word: stage
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Nobody seems to care that only three-quarters of the Met's 3,500 seats have a full view of the stage. The Met's hidebound directors have kept out all Negro singers-including Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. It may not be the Met's fault that opera is a declining art (the last first-rate popular opera was written in 1910), but the Met so far has done nothing to encourage the most promising opera composer of the day, England's young Benjamin (Peter Grimes) Britten (TIME...
Traubel's and Melchior's relationship is Falstaffian. In Die Walküre, when Traubel is left alone on stage, Melchior sometimes prances about the wings as a Rhine maiden in a grass skirt, to try to make her laugh. Once, when she leaned tenderly over his body on the couch in the last act of Tristan, in the scene where Tristan dies of wounds inflicted by a jealous rival, Melchior muttered: "Helena, hurry up the Liebestod (love death). I'm hungry and I need a beer...
Traubel likes to sing with Melchior because his size dwarfs hers. To dress her own vast proportions as handsomely as possible, Traubel has all her clothes-including her stage costumes-designed by Hollywood's Adrian. In the sewing room of Adrian's chic pastel salon, there is a headless and barrel-chested, size 46, grey muslin model standing majestically between those of Claudette Colbert, size 32, and Norma Shearer, size 32. Adrian's loose-leaf notebook lists the Traubel specifications after those for "Temple, Shirley." They tell a sizable story: "Bust, 51 inches [Shirley...
Wandering Byzantine craftsmen first brought "eikons" (images) into Russia, and set the stage for Russia's golden age (the 15th Century) of religious painting. Peter the Great hired Europeans to teach portraiture and allegorical landscape to Russian serfs (who were sometimes flogged for failure to produce a flattering likeness in good taste), turned 18th and 19th Century Russian art into a brackish backwater of the West...
...still suffering. . . . I am not content and I am scraping off, still scraping off. . . . I am like children in school. . . . I am still in the blotting stage-and I'm forty...