Word: opera
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Their voices float eerily across more than eight decades, ghostly echoes of a fabled operatic golden age: Nellie Melba, Emma Calvé, Jean de Reszke, Lillian Nordica and others, recorded live at the Metropolitan Opera by an enterprising music lover armed with an Edison cylinder machine. The sound is strictly low-fi, the scratchy surface noise is sometimes overwhelming, and the tantalizing fragments often break off abruptly with a singer in mid-phrase. But listening to them is thrilling, like hearing Lincoln recite the Gettysburg Address...
...under the auspices of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, the Performing Arts Research Center and the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, has heroically rescued all 134 of the surviving playable cylinders and issued them in a $100, six-record set available through the Metropolitan Opera Guild...
...self-importance of Manhattan's literary circles: he would stage a series of eight literary evenings, with two writers entertaining each night, and charge $1,000 a subscription. "Even more than the Met!" cried one amused writer, referring to the price of a season ticket to the Metropolitan Opera. Says Mailer: "I believed we would sell the tickets...
Every seven years they become British TV stars: "Suzi, the posh girl," and "Tony, the tearaway jockey boy," and poor dear Neil, and the rest of a dozen or so children who have grown up, or at least older, playing themselves in a real-life soap opera. They were selected in 1963 for a TV documentary called 7 Up and have sat for state-of-their-lives portraits in 1970, 1977 and 1984, all supervised by Michael Apted (director of Coal Miner's Daughter and Gorky Park). The latest installment, 28 Up, includes generous excerpts from the three previous reports...
...income of $50,600; 78% of you own your home and 94% your own car. You probably have a VCR, but 85% of you often turn to books for pleasure. Beyond that, you are physically active and enjoy attending sporting events as well as plays, the ballet and the opera...