Word: toscas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every opera fan knows how high Tosca bounced, when the next swan left and what Maria Callas thought of Renata Tebaldi; disasters, bons mots and bitchy remarks seem integral to the art. Ethan Mordden, who knows his way around backstage (Demented: The World of the Opera Diva; The Splendid Art of Opera), has gleefully amassed hundreds of such anecdotes, exchanges and choice bits of opera lore, along with some less celebrated stories. "Yet there is history here," he says, "for if many of the tales are silly, many others are telling...
Demand for New York's cultural offerings has tested the resourcefulness of the U.N. staff, which was able last week to produce, on short notice, tickets to the opening night of Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera for Poland's Jaruzelski. New York hotels are braced for the onslaught. The venerable Waldorf-Astoria, well trained in the care and feeding of outsize egos (Frank Sinatra and Lee Iacocca maintain permanent residences in the Waldorf Towers), employs a "flagman," whose sole duty is to keep track of the 115 foreign flags that the hotel keeps on hand and to fly the right...
DIED. George London, 64, commanding bass-baritone with a rich, dark-hued voice and the dramatic presence to convey the menace of Scarpia in La Tosca, the majesty of Wotan in The Ring and the elegance of Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro; after a long illness; in Armonk, N.Y. He found success quickly, with critically praised debuts at Europe's leading opera houses and New York City's Metropolitan. In 1960 he became the first American to sing Boris Godunov at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater. In 1967 a paralyzed vocal cord cut short his career; he turned...
...debut came in 1961, as Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore; that performance provoked a prolonged ovation for only the fifth black artist to sing a major role in the house since Marian Anderson broke the color line six years earlier. In such dramatic soprano roles as Tosca, Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni and Verdi's other Leonora, in La Forza del Destino, Price established herself as a prima donna assoluta, and in her greatest roles--Aida and the two Leonoras--there was no one better...
...Instead, she unleashed a voice elemental in its passionate intensity. When Price sang the Forza Leonora's Pace, pace, mio Dio, it was the heartrending plea of a desperate woman begging God for surcease; when she cried O Scarpia, avanti a Dio! at the end of Tosca, it was a chilling curse delivered at the gates of hell. And when she sang Aida's anguished O patria mia, as she did last week, it was a radiant invocation of pathos...