Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Mozart's librettist, Giambattista Varesco, brewed a confusing plot based on the Odyssey, with such extraneous characters as Electra thrown in. Idomeneo, King of Crete, is buffeted by storms on his return from the siege of Troy. To appease Poseidon, he swears to sacrifice the first person he encounters on landing. That turns out to be his son Idamante, who is in love with Ilia, daughter of the vanquished King of Troy. The gods finally clear up the whole matter, and the opera ends four hours later with Idamante and Ilia on the throne. Even the charm of Mozart...
...also felt that "it is the responsibility of contemporary musicians, ' who are the trustees of the great composers, to resurrect [their works] to the best of their ability." Goldovsky streamlined the opera down to bearable length (2½ hours), straightened out some of the curves in its tortuous plot. Then he put a student cast and chamber orchestra to work...
Towards the middle of the second reel, a few of the more interested members of the audience will discern a plot snuggling its way into the epic. It now appears that Robert Donat has been dancing altogether too many quadrilles with the queen, who is not incongruously impersonated by Binnie Barnes Donat, who happens to be playing an innocuous courtier named Cromwell, seems to have a prior claim, but after a few innocent bearhugs, he and Binnie go the way of all people Henry knew, and the latter, in the absence of a psychiatrist, marries again. But his spirit...
...Trujillo scotched the plot and then, in the style of Spain's Dictator Franco, magnified the Communist role beyond all reality? Had the revolutionaries, knocked off balance by Ortega's premature publicity, dropped their plan, or just deferred it? Last week the U.S. press front-paged reports that seven fighter planes bought from U.S. Army surplus had taken off from a Florida airfield, heading south. Trujillo's apprehensive plane patrols still scanned offshore waters and soldiers still manned the Dominican beaches...
...Figaro. But the big news was Danton's Death, composed by young (28) Gottfried von Einem, Austria's newest claim to musical fame. Einem had set to music Georg Büchner's 1834 drama of the French Revolution: he was inspired, he said, by the plot on Hitler's life, and the Nürnberg trials. Einem and his father, trying to escape to England in 1938, were jailed by the Nazis; his mother was imprisoned by the French, as a suspected collaborator...