Word: buffa
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Beyond such essentially show business concerns, Caldwell was operating on the premise that beneath the breast of the war horse beats the heart of a thoroughbred. The Barber ranks as a 19th century buffa masterpiece because its music is so innately ingratiating and so illustrative of both character and comic situation. Figaro's patter aria Largo al factotum ("Feeegaro! Feeegaro!") quickly defines him as one of the most likable hustlers in all opera. Rosina's Una voce poco fa is a song of such poise and bravura style as to remove all doubt that she will...
Ariadne was Strauss's way of allowing two rival traditions, opera seria and opera buffa, to interact with and define each other's strengths and weaknesses...
...stature. When Shakespeare boxes himself into a corner half way through, his personages cease to be rounded--if inconsistent--characters; he takes the Duke-Nixon outside the play and turns him into a sort of divine puppeteer who pulls his strings whimsically, and he winds up with an opera buffa finale that is in a different world altogether...
...roads, the chassis had to be redesigned to ride 1½ inches higher off the ground than the 124. To survive bitter Soviet winters, the car had to start unfailingly at -13° F. "To do all this in the time allowed, we had to take risks," recalls Vincenzo Buffa, Fiat vice-director-general. "We started building before we knew what machines would be needed" to construct the modified...
...Milan's La Scala revived one of his most difficult operas: The Siege of Corinth. A papier-mache tragedy about the Turkish conquest of Greece in the 15th century, it was not well liked at its Naples premiere in 1820; the audience expected Rossini's usual opera buffa, not blood and fireworks. The work fared little better elsewhere in Italy. Audiences found it too moralistic; singers were terrorized by its complexities. In fact, it was last heard at La Scala more than a century ago. Yet despite the twin handicaps of obscurity and popular indifference, the revival...