Word: cressida
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This play was designated a "comedy" in the Folio. Modern scholarship has tried to improve the situation by setting up a sub-category of "dark comedies" for All's Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure. But let's face it: All's Well simply is not a comedy, dark or otherwise--unless one wants to render the term meaningless by applying it to anything with a happy or, as in this case, pseudo-happy ending. (Actually, this ending is utterly absurd, unbelievable, perfunctory, and, for a man of Shakespeare's stature, inexcusable--the sort of thing one finds...
...debuts, can boast a list of U.S. premieres that puts the Met to shame. Last week San Francisco gave the first U.S. stage performances of two short works by German Composer Carl Orff-Die Kluge and Carmina Burana. Other noted San Francisco firsts: Walton's Troilus and Cressida, Poulenc's Carmelites, Honegger's Joan of Arc at the Stake. Retorted Bing: "My congratulations and greatest respect to Mr. Adler for his daring to introduce these operas to empty houses...
...lowering of standards was countenanced. And the HTW proceeded to give a remarkable series of productions, including Shakespeare's Henry IV, 1 (with Kilty as Falstaff, a performance that no-one but Kilty himself has since equaled), Richard II (with a wardrobe of costumes costing $1600), Troilus and Cressida, and The Tempest...
...handsome productions of Cherubini's short The Portuguese Inn, and Honegger's Joan of Arc at the Stake, both performed for the first time on a U.S. opera stage. The next year he followed up with the U.S. premiere of Sir William Walton's Troilus and Cressida. Adler also revived such difficult classics as Verdi's Macbeth and Wagner's Flying Dutchman, gradually building up his own high-caliber stable of singers, including Germany's Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Vienna's Leonie Rysanek, British Tenor Richard Lewis, and a strong group of young American discoveries...
...Brandt). Of his feelings at the time, he says laconically: "I suppose sex entered into it. After all, what's a woman for?" But in dedicating Son of Perdition, Cozzens was more gallant. The flyleaf is inscribed to her with these lines from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: "Outliving her beauty's outward, with a mind/ That doth renew swifter than blood decays." Cozzens recalls: "Mother almost died when I married a Jew, but later when she saw I was being decently cared for, she realized that it was the best thing that could have happened...