Word: wagnerism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...said that it was silly not to have "realistic" characters in opera-so he created Orfeo and Euridice, with their set, face-front arias. Bellini (1801-35) and Donizetti (1797-1848) thought Gluck's characters were insufficiently real-so they created the stylized Norma and Lucia. Wagner (1813-83) avowed the same sentiment-and created Lohengrin and his swan. Puccini (1858-1924) proclaimed a brand of truthfulness he called verismo -and created Turandot, the princess of a China that could never have existed anywhere...
Manager's Ideal. Beame's victory in the primary came as a surprise, since the front-running candidate, City Council President Paul Screvane, had an undisputed record of administrative ability as well as the not-unmixed boon of Mayor Robert Wagner's blessing. Yet Beame, as a candidate for mayor of New York, could almost have been invented by a campaign manager. Born in London, in the course of his poor Jewish parents' emigration from Warsaw, he grew up on the bleakest Lower East Side, earned his tuition through the College of the City...
Demand for a Veto. As soon as the Guild struck, Mayor Wagner summoned home his troubleshooting labor mediator, Ted Kheel, from a Copenhagen conference on automation, which is, ironically, the key issue in the New York dispute. Kheel closeted himself with the negotiators, and the group stayed in session from 7 in the evening until 8 the next morning. Two hours later, they reconvened and kept at it until 1 the following morning, when a haggard, pallid Kheel announced: "With the benefit of sleep and reflection, we will be able to move forward." His optimism was well meant, but Kheel...
...prizes for water-saving ideas and got some good ones (first winner: don't rinse empty milk bottles). City hall was bombarded with suggestions, among them a proposal to ban shaving and a surefire formula for rain: hang a freshly killed snake in a tree. Mayor Robert Wagner became enthusiastic over the possibilities of rainmaking after reading a newspaper story about a new electronic device that was said to have dumped torrents on parched Escondido, Calif. As it turned out, Escondido had received less rainfall than New York−half an inch since July 1. Undaunted, a Wagnerian team...
...Harlem's Fountain Springs Baptist Church invoked an older response to drought. Three times a day, their pastor instructed them, they were all to pray for rain. A less idealistic proposal was offered by Congressman William F. Ryan, a candidate for the Democratic mayoral nomination, who says Wagner should fire his Water Supply Commissioner for not fixing leaks in water mains. Just for emphasis, Ryan rolled up his pants and waded through one gusher in Central Park−he even drank some of the water−but the department said it was nature's water, not the city...