Word: favorita
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There's more pomp than circumstance in Donizetti's La Favorita. There is no onstage action in the opera, and the plot moves with godlike indolence. In the last century it was popular because of its pretty, skillfully written melodies and because 19th century audiences rather liked a long evening in the theater...
...Pavarotti to undertake such a vehicle, as he did last week at New York City's Metropolitan Opera. The commanding tenor today, he can do a great many things wonderfully well. Some of them, like spinning out a legato line or singing a high C, are displayed in La Favorita. As an actor Pavarotti can be funny or tragic (both in La Bohème), or a careless aristocrat (the Duke in Rigoletto). But with his native wit and musical intelligence, Pavarotti cannot act dumb. Unfortunately, that is required of Fernando, the hero of La Favorita...
...peak of his rambunctious form, Chairman Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western Industries, one of the world's biggest conglomerates (1976 sales: $3.4 billion), is a curiously compulsive monologuist. Whether lolling with a weekend visitor by a sleepy lagoon outside his luxurious beach house, La Favorita, in the Dominican Republic or lecturing to an awed audience in his company's baronial headquarters suite overlooking Manhattan's Central Park, Bluhdorn fearlessly offers his forthright and often funny opinions on such disparate topics as acquisition strategy ("I want to buy things no one else wants"), American businessmen ("They have surrounded...
...visiting Italians was buxom, blonde Ebe Stignani, whom many European critics consider the greatest mezzo-soprano of the day. She was superb in Il Trovatore, and she even lifted a drab production of La Favorita. After Favorita one critic said that Stignani could make Three Blind Mice sound like celestial music...
...Maria Metten, daughter of the Chief of Police of Namur, Belgium. A mezzo-soprano, she sang in church choirs and local concerts, yearned to be an opera singer. But Bourgeois Papa Metten would have no truck with such notions. When Daughter Maria got a bit in La Favorita with a local opera company, went home with an armful of flowers after what she considered a triumphal debut, she found the Metten doors sternly locked. Thereupon Maria Metten borrowed money from friends, went to Brussels, then to Paris, finally made a clean break with her family by getting...