La Repubblica declared Riccardo Chailly's conducting of Verdi's great Egyptian opera "a colossal triumph" and dubbed the 83-year-old director "King Zeffirelli".
"Because of a tossed salad of latent Freudian inadequacy issues," he writes, "middle-aged men will perform fellatio on a clump of cured leaves and somehow feel more like men because of it, which, if nothing else, is a colossal triumph of marketing.
"If by this time next week" Ms. Tymoshenko and other opposition figures have been freed, "this will have been a colossal triumph of diplomatic negotiation and reason, and Ukraine will have really moved to address the European Union's concerns," the diplomat said.
Of course, this is remembered as a colossal triumph, which involves a willed amnesia about the huge groundswell of stories before its release about the impending opposite: how terrifyingly unsafe the production was and how brutally Cameron had been driving his cast.
The aim of its Beyond Coal campaign is to retire all 522 such plants in the United States, which would be a colossal triumph.
