Word: adelina
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...fairness to Miss Ponselle, disgruntled critics would have done well to point to the fact that there have been few successful Carmens. The redoubtable Lilli Lehmann sang the role like a Brünnhilde. Adelina Patti was completely unsuited to it. Most effective impersonation was by fiery Emma Calvé, though purists fussed at her because she took liberties with the music. Farrar's popular Carmen lacked the finesse of many of her other roles. Mary Garden was not at her best in the part. Maria Jeritza failed to stand the test. Those who disliked Ponselle's performance...
...made news with every utterance, set fashions in food and dress, left vivid memories with every song they sang. Old men still live who remember pious Jenny Lind when she trilled in gaslit Castle Garden, a protégée of that amazing Yankee, Phineas T. Barnum. Adelina Patti was singing at the old Academy of Music on 14th Street when broughams first brought Vanderbilts and Astors to the shiny new doors of the Metropolitan Opera House...
Sembrich did her flawless trills in Lucia di Lammermoor at the second performance given in the Metropolitan Opera House. (Downtown at the old Academy of Music Adelina Patti was singing.) Sembrich sang with Caruso when he made his U. S. debut in 1903. She was with the Metropolitan when it visited San Francisco at the time of the great fire. Caruso, who was shaken out of bed, would never sing in San Francisco again. Sembrich was frightened, too. But she stayed to give a concert, earned over $10,000 which she divided between the choristers and the orchestra players...
Julia lived in an exciting world, and knew it. She heard Adelina Patti sing, was carried away by Johann Strauss's conducting, thrilled to Col. Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte's eyewitness account of Balaclava, wrote exclamation-filled pages on the Franco-Prussian War, and mourned, as even a poor little rich girl could, the Chicago Fire which swept away their grand house, her studio with its private staircase...
...momentary stir when he came before the court and said: "I, Paganini, am not dead." He played none too well, and when Soprano Frieda Hempel did her old Jenny Lind act, she sang off pitch. But nobody minded, especially when Soprano Bori came forward. Soprano Bori that evening was Adelina Patti, dressed in crinoline, a wreath around her hair. "I, Adelina Patti." she said, "have a message for you from one of my much younger colleagues. Lucrezia Bori. The Metropolitan has been saved. . . . Lucrezia Bori thanks you." Well through the night the merriment went on. Royalty became democratic, went visiting...