"Murder at the Opera" - читать интересную книгу автора (Truman Margaret)AUTHOR’S NOTEFifty years ago Day Thorpe, music critic of the now defunct Washington Star, decided along with a few like-minded souls that Washington, D.C., needed an opera company, and founded the Opera Society of Washington, later changed to the simpler Washington Opera, and in 2000 renamed the Washington National Opera by an act of Congress. This Congressional name change was not inconsequential. Not only did America now have its own official opera company, all fifty states had a stake in it, giving those who raise necessary funds for the company a broader potential source of financial support. The Washington National Opera (WNO) has evolved and grown over the past five decades from a regional company into one of international acclaim. Its productions rival those of the leading opera companies of America – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco -and the world. In the beginning, performances were staged in small, cramped, borrowed theaters. But since 1971 it has staged its performances in the magnificent 2,300-seat Kennedy Center Opera House, and has been the resident opera company of the Kennedy Center ever since. So, in reality, this book is about the Washington National Opera specifically, rather than the world of opera in general. My decision to have people murdered at the Washington National Opera does not reflect actual events there. Of course, many great operas that have graced the stage of the Kennedy Center Opera House present murder in its most dramatic form, death throes onstage as long and lingering as the musical score calls for. But any relationship between the murdered and the murderers in this book, and those real people who make the Washington National Opera the actual, splendid institution that it is, is happily, purely coincidental. Finally, my hat is off to those at the Washington National Opera who made the courageous decision to ignore the protests of curmudgeonly purists, and to use English supertitles to translate operas at the Kennedy Center. English supertitles, or surtitles, came into popular use in the early 1980s and have been instrumental in widening the audience for opera. They’ve also tempered the temptation to present foreign operas in English, as grievous a sin as belatedly coloring classic black-and-white motion pictures. As H. L. Mencken once said, “Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.” Or, as Sir Edward Appleton wrote in The Observer in 1955, “I do not mind what language opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don’t understand.” Margaret Truman New York 2006 |
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