Music: Callas at Covent Garden

Early one Saturday last May, a thin, grim line started forming outside the Royal Opera House at London's Covent Garden. All through the long Whitsun weekend it sweltered and swelled, until, the following Tuesday, tickets went on sale for the first London performance of Cherubini's Medea in 89 years. Within three hours every seat in the house was sold out. Last week the lucky ticket holders finally got a look at what they had battled so tenaciously to see: Maria Meneghini Callas in the role of Euripides' savagely tormented heroine.

The Covent Garden production...

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