Word: caruso
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Enrico Caruso was the tenor, Arturo Toscanini the conductor on that November night in 1908 when Giulio Gatti-Casazza mounted his first performance as manager of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera Company. The opera was A'ida, chosen by Gatti out of reverence for his friend and hero, Composer Giuseppe Verdi. Lately Gatti has been accused of being old-fashioned and reactionary. But last week as he began his farewell season at the Metropolitan, the sphinxy Gatti behaved as if he had never heard the carping. Again for the opening night he chose...
First-nighters thought Gatti might break his rule last week, take a curtain call with the singers and the new conductor. But Gatti took his first and last bow from the Metropolitan stage in 1908, standing proudly between his friends Toscanini and Caruso...
...could have boasted rightfully of his business prowess. In the Opera's palmy days had he not made performances pay for themselves in addition to providing a $1,000,000 nest egg? He could have recalled many historic scenes: plump little Marcella Sembrich making her operatic farewell; Enrico Caruso singing his last, as the bearded Jew in Halévy's La Juive; Geraldine Farrar appearing in Die Königskinder with a flock of real, live geese (TIME, Nov. 12); Maria Jeritza giving her first breath-taking Tosca; Marion Talley making her début with mounted...
When Geraldine Farrar announced to the world that, at 40, she would retire from opera, none but close friends took her seriously. She was still in her heyday?gay, darkly handsome, alive with magnetism. While Caruso was the great voice at the Metropolitan, she was filling the old house with glamour and excitement. Her 40th birthday came on Feb. 28, 1922. Less than two months later she gave her farewell performance. That memorable afternoon streamers were hurled from the balconies, flowers and confetti were piled on the stage. A great audience stood and cheered through its tears...
...already nationally popular and that day Jimmie Rodgers became the greatest hillbilly of all. Tired, unshaven, racked with tuberculosis, he twanged his guitar, sang and yodeled ''Sleep, Baby, Sleep." Victor made a record of it. Within a year it sold more than 1,000,000 copies, topping Caruso's sales for any single year of his career. Jimmie Rodgers' second recording was called "Blue Yodel." So popular did it prove that he followed it with a "Blue Yodel No. 2," then a "No. 3" until he sang 25 of them, sold...