Word: amelia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Backstage, 29-year-old Yugoslav Soprano Daniza Ilitsch, late of a Nazi concentration camp, nervously awaited the call for her first Met performance as Amelia in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. In the pit, a new Italian conductor, Giuseppe Antonicelli, was making his Met debut...
Contemporary composers rarely crash the culture-pearly gates of the Metropolitan Opera Company. Italian-born Gian-Carlo Menotti has done it twice in the past ten years. It has been an honor unaccompanied by noises of a cash register. Menotti's 1937 Amelia Goes to the Ball and his 1942 The Island God together got only nine Met performances (he was paid about $150 a time). In 1939 he wrote a modest little chamber opera for the radio, The Old Maid and the Thief, which has since been given 100 times and earned far more than his grand operas...
With Fellow Composer Samuel Barber, Poet Robert Horan and a cocker spaniel, he lives in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. He is still an Italian citizen, but except for Amelia Goes to the Ball, his work is almost unknown in his native Italy. When the war came Mussolini's censors put Menotti on the forbidden list. Anyway, opera like The Telephone wouldn't be grand enough. Says Menotti: "In Italy they hate chamber opera. They like to have about 500 people in the cast...
...looks just before he died, Thornton Hunt gave this testimony: "The outline of the features and face possesses firmness and hardness entirely inconsistent with a feminine character. . . ." Biographer Blunden finds it regrettable that no portrait of Shelley except the very young and rather girlish one by Amelia Curran has survived. To Blunden, Shelley exemplifies "the supreme capacity called genius...
...tending his magnificent flower garden at Santa Comba. It was there, and through the medium of the flowers he loves, that he met the woman who has in the last few months made an extraordinary difference in his life. When he decided to give a reception for Dona Amelia de Orleans e Braganga, mother of Don Duarte Nufio, the pretender to Portugal's throne, his advisers suggested that the Countess de la Seca, a widow with two young children, should act as hostess. When the Countess took over the flower arrangement for the party, Salazar was so impressed...