Word: verdis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi directed by Liat Kaplan and Joel Bard starring Laurie Ann McGowan, Frank Ragdsale and Michael Morizio at the Lowell House dining hall March...
...Verdi's 1853 musical adaptation of a play by Alexandre Dumas is the first of many works based on the timeless story of the two star-crossed lovers, the most well-known of which is the film version "Camille" with Greta Garbo. The story's adaptability to the opera stage, the ballet stage, and even the silver screen is remarkable, and perhaps is owed to the simplicity of the heroine's tragic plight. Called Violetta in Verdi's opera, she is a consumptive courtesan in the decadent world of mid-19th century Paris, older and more worldly than her counterpart...
...garish lipstick on an album cover or the combination of Renata Tebaldi's ample bosom and her tight costume on the over of Aida) to the aural (Marilyn Horne singing "Mon coeur" from saint-Saen's Samson and Delilah, Anna Moffo's delivery of the single word disvelto in Verdi's Rigoletto) and even the oral (in a discussion of opera as addictive behavior, he calls listening to an entire opera the equivalent of locking himself in the bathroom to eat a quart of ice cream) and the olfactory (the unmistakable smell of his parent's wood stereo cabinet...
...more dramatic travels, battles and death at Missolonghi there is scarcely a word. Such a conception might have worked had Thomson been a composer of passion and power, had he been able to write music commensurate with Byron's words and deeds -- had he been, in short, the Verdi of Otello or the Berg of Wozzeck. But he wasn't. (The score, which incongruously quotes both Did You Ever See a Lassie and Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms, is like The Rake's Progress without the wrong notes.) And so there Lord Byron sits, as fresh, buoyant...
...ideas and images about the Arab world were contrived by Western writers and why. Now comes Culture and Imperialism (Knopf; $25). A plum pudding of a book, with excursions on such matters as Irish-nationalist poetry and the building of an opera house in Cairo for the launch of Verdi's Aida, it is the product of a culturally hypersaturated mind, moving between art and politics, showing how they do or might intermesh -- but never with the coarse ideological reductiveness of argument so common in America nowadays. Said's theme is how the three big realities of empire -- imperialism, "native...