Word: adriana
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Need something for an elderly maiden aunt? Here is romantic pish-tush, complete with nobility, scurrility, offstage virility, plight, blight, violent demise and intentions tragically mistaken. The locale is Rome. The heroine is Adriana, an aristocratic Italian beauty. One day, she is struck down by that scourge of modern-day Italy, a Vespa. She is helped to her feet by an imposing policeman, Captain Falconieri, in whom any reasonably perceptive reader can discern the ingredients of a true lover: "Above all, in the powerful current of masculinity beamed towards her." The current, however, is short-circuited by calamities-knifings, renunciations...
...hair red. When she returned to the Metropolitan Opera last week after an absence of a year, she decided that having refurbished her form, she would also refurbish an old -to Met audiences-unfamiliar role. She insisted on singing the title part in Francesco Cilèa's Adriana Lecouvreur, an opera that had been performed at the Met just twice, a half-century...
Tough Trick. Adriana may be a stranger to U.S. and English audiences, but the opera is a repertory staple in Italy. Composer Cilèa (pronounced che-lay-ah) wrote it when he was 35, and it established his reputation. He coasted on it from its premiere in 1902 until his death in 1950. It is a respectable enough opera, reminiscent of Puccini in its throbbing arias and duets and in its yearning strings. It even has a predictably pathetic ending, in which the heroine is punished for the crime of having fallen in love...
...trick for a soprano in Adriana is to seize the stage before the tenor has a chance to plant himself with arms thrown wide to uncoil one of the soaring rhapsodies that billow through the length of the opera. The trick is particularly tough when the tenor is as talented a scene stealer as Franco Corelli, but Tebaldi handled the job nicely. When she came on in Act I in an ivory gown and red hair, she looked so startlingly unlike the matronly Tebaldi of other years that even her devoted claque paused in surprise for the space...
...voice dwindled with the poundage. Adriana is an opera in which Tebaldi can sing much of the time toward the center of her range, where she is happiest, and in last week's performance her voice had all the remembered caressing skill that can breathe dramatic life into a line with effortless ease. Her role gave her ample opportunity to float out those clear, carrying pianissimos that reach to the last row in the house...