Word: virgil
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Peru's multi-octaved Yma Sumac, whose extraordinary voice ranges easily from a mockingbird soprano to a deep, womanly baritone, gave a concert in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, so impressed the Herald Tribune's Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson that he wrote: "She belongs in the great houses of opera." Said Yma, who claims to be 24: "It's too late for me to do it . . . [Besides,] I make very much more money than if I sang in two cr three operas a year for the Metropolitan...
...Although the Figaro performance got good notices, the Met had a pretty rough week. Critic Virgil Thomson of the Herald Tribune took aim at the impressionistic new stage set with which Rudolf Bing & Co. have tried to brighten Don Giovanni, and let go with both barrels: "In this presentation, Don Giovanni lives just across the street from Donna Anna, but she does not recognize him when he tries to rape her ... All this residential proximity turns the story into a news item about how two ladies got rid of a criminal neighbor...
...Mirror's publisher, Virgil M. Pink-ley, ex-U.P. general manager for Europe, knew what to do about that. He turned its front page around and set out aggressively to give the Mirror a crisp, sensational style ("All news stories are written too long, including those in the Mirror"). Los Angeles, said Pinkley, "needs a fighting newspaper [and] the Mirror is anyone's fist in a good fight." The paper picked its fights carefully, more often to woo new readers than for any lofty civic motives. Mirrormen breezily campaigned against everything from "black-market baby rackets...
...with the razor.* Until he goes to sleep in his simple brass bed between 12 and 2 a.m., Gretel is his only entertainment. He rarely listens any more to the records from his fine collection (favorites: Bach, Brahms, Wagner), and he has given up poetry and the classics (favorite: Virgil) for the lives of the saints. During his hour's daily walk in the magnificent Vatican garden, he studies state papers...
...Touch of Robin Hood. In the meantime, the success of his first book of poems salved his ego without going to his head: "When I read [Virgil's] Georgics, and then survey my own powers, 'tis like the idea of a Shetland Pony, drawn up by the side of a thoroughbred Hunter." He attracted patrons but he rarely kowtowed to them, feeling that it was a common hypocrisy with poets, "when their Patrons try their hand at a Rhyme, to cry up the Honorable or Right Honorable performance as Matchless, Divine...