Word: capriccios
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...three years Soprano Moffo has been riding high on the European opera and concert circuit. To U.S. opera buffs, she is known as the star of several fine recordings, including Madame Butterfly (RCA Victor) and Capriccio (Angel). As Verdi's consumptive heroine, she demonstrated last week that her acting is almost as good as her voice. Strikingly handsome in a hoopskirted, bare-shouldered, pink ball gown, she made the Violetta of Act I into a moving figure of feverishly hectic gaiety. As the opera progressed, the coquettish attitudes gave way gradually, until by the final act Violetta emerged...
Richard Strauss completed his last opera, Capriccio, in 1941. but the world that he and co-Librettist Clemens Kraus invoked in their "conversation piece for music" was as remote in spirit from the chaos of a Bremen or a Mannheim as Strauss's Bavarian mountain retreat was from the final convulsions of the Third Reich. The subject is opera itself-the relative merits of words and music-and it might just as aptly have been summed up under the title Six Characters in Search of an Opera. In a rococo salon near Paris, the six main figures sit chatting...
...Capriccio had its premiere in the war-scarred Munich of 1942 and has only rarely been seen outside since. Now in a complete recording (Angel, 3 LPs) for the first time, it proves to be one of Strauss's most fascinating works. Too static for the stage, it is studded with passages of surpassing orchestral and vocal beauty: the sweetly melancholy string sextet that serves as an overture; the delicately interlaced trio in which Musician, Poet and Countess comment on the Poet's sonnet; the Countess' hushed mirror monologue at the close, with its spun-silver vocal...
...contrast to the strolling guitar players who frequented the Capriccio, Bach fugues and fifteenth century canciones provide background music at the Mozart. "I much prefer to listen to Schweitzer play Bach than have someone strumming in here. Besides I don't like the guitar much--except for Segovia. I also try to discourage the exhibitionist tendency so often found in today's coffee houses, and I think it is very well discouraged here...
...spirit I wanted. But I don't want to imitate a European coffee house. The Mozart is a Cambridge cafe. I want it unique. I am not in competition with others and I don't think a valid comparison can be made between the Mozart and the old Capriccio...