Word: campanini
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...should advise the directors of the Metropolitan, said Tenor Italo Campanini, "to tear out the inside of their building and rebuild...
...house is unfit for music." That was just after the Met concluded its first Manhattan season, and Tenor Campanini's observation has been echoed by many a singer since. The Met has nevertheless attracted more first-rate stars than any other of the world's great opera houses. This week the house celebrates its 75th anniversary with a nostalgic birthday review (lantern slides and ancient recordings assembled by the Metropolitan Opera Guild) of some of its finest achievements. The yellow brick house was built (in 1883) at a cost of $1,732,478.71, principally as a showcase...
From the first night (Faust, sung in Italian, with Christine Nilsson as Marguerite, Campanini in the title role, and Franco Novarro as Mephistopheles), regular seat holders howled about obstructed views, and singers complained about the strenuous demands the huge house placed on their voices. But nobody ever complained about the acoustics: Architect Cady had the good sense to face the auditorium with wood and to build an egg-shaped masonry sound chamber beneath the orchestra pit. During its early years, the Met removed the seats, held charity balls and a flower show on the orchestra floor. When Impresario Henry Abbey...
...central characters are a couple of Abbott & Costello-like American sailors (Walter Chiari and Carlo Campanini) who are knocked out by thugs while sightseeing in the Colosseum and dream that they are having all sorts of misadventures in ancient Rome. Among the picture's low-comedy highlights: the voluptuous Empress Poppea (Silvana Pampanini) taking a milk bath that out-DeMilles De-Mille; the sailors engaging in a pocket-billiard contest with Nero (Gino Cervi); gladiators waging a savage football game in the Colosseum with a Grecian urn as a pigskin; a Roman orgy with jitterbugging; a frenzied chariot race...