Word: jeritza
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...similar occasion for dressing up; archducal and bourgeois jewelry alike came out of hock or hiding. Demel's, Vienna's calorie-proud confectioner, combined Austria's two major treasures-music and food-in an exhibition of sugar figurines representing notable Vienna opera greats, e.g., Sopranos Maria Jeritza, Lotte Lehmann, Vera Schwarz...
Opera stars seemed personal friends-or foes-of everyone in town. Once, when Contralto Maria Olszewska spat upon Maria Jeritza during a performance of Wagner's Die Walküre, partisans were close to rioting in cafes all over Vienna. Even while the war-gutted opera house was being slowly rebuilt during the past decade, Vienna managed to put on 600 opera performances a year in other houses (the Met stages about 200, including tours). And the Vienna telephone company offers each day's opera bill, with recorded excerpts...
...Gustav Mahler, a perfectionist who, so legend has it, personally walked Brünnhilde's horse around the Ringstrasse before the performance of Götterdämmerung in order to prevent stage accidents. Vienna was never especially fond of innovations, but some became famous. When Soprano Maria Jeritza was rehearsing Tosca with a Scarpia who knew not his own strength, she landed flat on her face on the floor just before her big aria, Vissi d'arte. She sang it from there, and seldom afterwards did it any other...
Steber's test came in a concert-version revival of Richard Strauss's fairy-tale opera, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), and in a soprano role which Vienna's beloved Maria Jeritza introduced to the Viennese in 1919. The story: an emperor on a hunt sees a white gazelle, and when he throws his spear at her, she turns into a woman. The emperor takes her home and makes her his wife. But the new empress does not cast a shadow, and, uneasily, the emperor realizes that his bewitching wife is not really...
After a Salzburg recital, at which courteous critics favorably compared her personality with that of France's Mistinguetr but tactfully omitted mention of her voice, oldtime Opera Diva Maria Jeritza, now a mellow 63, arrived in Vienna. Looking forward to hearing her try another comeback next week, enthusiastic fans swarmed the streets; a band serenaded her hotel until she stepped out on the balcony and threw garlands of flowers to the crowd. Her husband, a Newark umbrella manufacturer, was doing his part to help the buildup. He had already given away 10,000 umbrellas to his wife...