Word: boito
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...scooted onstage, music-lovers in the peanut galleries leaned over the rails to hiss the buzz-buzz in the parquet into silence. Then, in the still, warm, muggy air (two women in the crowded audience fainted), they listened for three hours to the romantic music of Poet-Musician Arrigo Boito, whom all Milan was honoring on the 30th anniversary of his death...
...audience had, in fact, come to honor both the living and the dead. The final lush chords of Boito's music (from his operas Mefistofele and Nerone) were drowned by applause. But when 81-year-old Conductor Toscanini hopped spryly down from the podium, the whole house was on its feet screaming "viva il maestro;" cried one voice, "Non c'e che lui" (he's in a class by himself). For 19 minutes the bedlam continued; the soloists (two of whom, Soprano Herva Nelli and Baritone Frank Guarrera, Metropolitan audition winner, had been brought from...
Debt of Honor. For the little maestro, it was far more than a personal triumph: he had also satisfied a debt of honor that had nagged him for 30 years. As a young man he had conducted Boito's pompously romantic opera, Mefistofele. Their friendship had ripened while Boito was busy winning greater fame as the librettist of Verdi's Otello and Falstaff-and plugging away for years at another opera of his own, Nerone...
Toscanini and Boito had wept together at the first piano reading of Nerone. But when Boito orchestrated it, Toscanini felt the orchestration faulty, and said so. They quarreled. Years later, Toscanini heard that Boito was dying in an obscure clinic in Milan; he arrived too late to see him alive. Toscanini spent two years finishing the orchestration of Nerone and gave its first performance at La Scala in 1924. But, say Toscanini's friends, he has always felt that he had failed his onetime comrade...
...Chicago opera house handsome Basso Ezio Pinza made a suave, red-clawed devil in Boito's Mefistofele. The Marguerite was Soprano Edith Mason, oldtime Chicago favorite. Dominant behind the scenes was Italian Paul Longone, with the title of "General Manager...