Word: traviatas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pages ever since have attested to her tantrum power, and there have been moments when the sounds of her critics almost obscured the sound of her voice. But last week, in her first Metropolitan Opera appearance of the season, Callas the singer soared above Callas the shrew, and sang Traviata with an impassioned poignancy unmatched in years. See Music, Diva's Return...
When Maria Meneghini Callas, in a gleaming white hoopskirt gown, stepped demurely before the Metropolitan Opera's golden curtain after the first act of Verdi's La Traviata last week, plainclothesmen planted themselves at the head of the aisles near the stage. Nobody was sure who was supposed to be protected from what, but the cops' presence was clearly unnecessary. On her first Met appearance this season, Soprano Callas carried the house from the moment she lifted her first note across the orchestra...
Forgotten was Callas' walkout from the Rome Opera last month (TIME, Jan. 13) when she lost her voice during a performance of Norma. At the final curtain she took ten solo bows. The true measure of how totally Callas dominated last week's Traviata was the credibility she brought to the younger Dumas' tears-and-champagne tale of the consumptive courtesan-with scant help from a minor-league cast. As Alfredo, Tenor Daniele Barioni sang powerfully but uncertainly and sometimes off-key, acted in an emotional monotone that made his rages indistinguishable from his passions...
...character of Violetta with ardency, hectic gaiety and a dampened passion that flickered through the role like a wayward fever. Her deathbed agonies had the quiet poignancy and the ring of truth that so often evade lesser artists. All in all, Callas gave the Met its most exciting Traviata in years, and demonstrated again that she has lost none of the turbulent appeal that can magnetize an audience at the flick of an arm or a twist of the head. Diva Callas' next Met roles: Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Puccini's Tosca...
Young Dumas' famed novel, The Lady of the Camellias (made into a play by Dumas himself and into a grand opera-La Traviata-by Verdi) was based on his love for Courtesan Marie Duplessis. She supplied him with "intoxicating orgies of the flesh"-and he, in return, struggled to reform her, adored her most when she "played the part of the repentant Magdalene." Marie died of consumption at 23, and young Dumas never forgot her glamorous, terrible life. He became "The Man in Flight from Temptation," began to write plays in which seducers were condemned with such cold precision...