Word: traviatas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some of Pressagent Williamson's ideas were on the ribald side, e.g., "Dove sono?" ("Where have they gone?"), from The Marriage of Figaro, would show a girl who has dropped her falsies. Others were plain wacky, e.g., "Parigi, o cara" ("Paris, my dear"), from Traviata, would show one lady demonstrating a strange new garment to another. "Caro name" ("Dear name"), from Rigoletto, would show a sugar daddy signing a fat check for his girl friend. Pressagent Williamson (whose clients have included Gladys Swarthout, Ezio Pinza, Helen Traubel) persuaded Austrian-born Artist Susan Perl to put her ideas on paper...
...dark-hued old sounds partly hi-fizzed through electronic tinkering. The first series contains all of Tchaikovsky's six Symphonies performed by such fictitiously named orchestras as "Centennial," "Warwick," "Cromwell."* The second batch, called The Heart of the Opera, contains excerpts from eleven popular operas (Carmen, Faust, Figaro, Traviata, etc.), some of them excellently sung by voices that are familiar music-room words.† The sound is poor to moderately good, but the price ($1.98 per LP) is just fine. Furthermore, the disks provide a brand-new musical guessing game...
...Mythology. By the hundreds they have swarmed across a hundred thousand movie screens from Aliquippa to Zagazig -mice that talk and grubs that chainsmoke, squirrels wearing overalls, bashful bunnies, sexy goldfish, tongue-tied ducks and hounds on ice skates, dachshunds bow-tied, pigs at pianos, chickens doing Traviata-even worms that do the cootch...
After a successful series of performances in Germany, Boulevard Solitude was chosen as a showpiece for Rome's two-week International Conference on Contemporary Music. Familiar as they were with operatic plots featuring faithless love (Pagliacci), harlotry (Traviata), rape (Don Giovanni), incest (Die Walküre), bastardy (Norma), Gomorrahism (The Rake's Progress) and murder (Tosca, etc.), Rome's select first-night audience balked at Boulevard Solitude...
...fiasco" of The Rake's Progress in its second season at the Metropolitan Opera [TIME, Feb. 8] underlines a circumstance that has long been obvious: Met audiences are not responsive to novelty, good or bad . . . The audiences, for the most part, prefer to listen to Carmen or Traviata for the hundred-and-umpteenth time. Or do they actually listen, even to their favorites? Isn't it rather a matter of going to the opera house to be pleasurably stroked, as it were, by a succession of familiar sounds...