Word: arrigo
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...style: an ornate realistic idol in one scene, a starkly abstract grillwork in another. Although it took in a record $91,482 at the box office, the Met's new Nabucco was not likely to join vintage Verdi in the regular repertory. One reason was suggested by Arrigo Boito, the great librettist of Verdi's old age. The music would never be as powerfully appealing, Boito felt, to audiences not bred on Italian soil and breathing Italian...
...composers' work. With a near-monopolistic control over Italian opera, Giulio attended rehearsals at La Scala, recommended the hiring or firing of singers, publicly castigated conductors. A pet hate for a time: Toscanini, whose style he once likened to a "mastodonic mechanical piano." Above all, Giulio commissioned Arrigo Boîto to write the librettos of Otello and Falstaff, which fired the aged Verdi into composing again. Although Puccini drew monthly advances for nine years before paying the money back, their friendship was sometimes stormy. "All composers," Giulio wrote him once, "French, English, German, Turkish and Abyssinian...
...emotional insights of Otello, but it is also marred by trivia, such as a kind of witches' cancan in the first scene. The libretto (by Verdi, put into verse by Francesco Piave) dimly reflects some of the original's greatness, but it is far behind Librettist Arrigo Boito's Otello and Falstaff, and is essentially a choppy, ill-balanced synopsis. The Met's production, while brilliant in most respects, was faulted by some ludicrous details and a kind of Teutonic touch that is alien both to Verdi's Italian music and to Shakespeare...
Latest addition to the heartwarming legend growing up around Pope John XXIII: at a recent audience for a group of Italian bishops. His Holiness, who served as an NCO with an Italian medical unit during World War I, spied the Rt. Rev. Arrigo Pintonello, chief chaplain of the Italian army, wearing a general's insignia. As the bishop prepared to genuflect and kiss the papal ring, the Pope stepped up smiling, saluted, reported in: ''Sir, Sergeant Roncalli, at your command...
...entered the Arrigo Boito Conservatory in Parma and began studying voice. In 1940, when she was 18 and on a Christmas visit to her aunt in Pesaro, she got her big break: an audition with famed Soprano Carmen Melis, venerated in Italy as one of the great Puccini singers of all time, and then a teacher at the Rossini Conservatory. Melis took on Tebaldi as a fulltime pupil, made her into the kind of singer she is today. Melis worked on voice placement, taught Tebaldi the piano singing to which her voice is naturally adapted. As models, Melis pointed...