Word: carusos
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Said Bing: "The Metropolitan can hardly afford to lose any great artist, but, after all, it did survive the departure of Caruso...
Milan's La Scala has been going for 171 years. And for most of that time it has been one of the world's greatest opera houses. Its audiences had heard premieres of the operas of Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Puccini. The greatest singers-Patti, Melba, Caruso, Chaliapin, Gigli-all graced its stage. From 1921 to 1929, under Arturo Toscanini, La Scala seemed to have reached a golden plateau. But last week even the proudest Milanese were admitting that something was very wrong with their great opera house...
...Surrender (Paramount) describes the adventures of a backwoods Cinderella (Wanda Hendrix) living in turn-of-the-century New England with a stern husband (Claude Rains) old enough to be her father. The pumpkin which gets her away from it all is a primitive talking-machine and a handful of Caruso recordings which she keeps hidden in a hillside cave for solitary recitals. Her prince charming is a rich city slicker (Macdonald Carey) who whisks her off to a nearby metropolis for an innocent, giddy evening of champagne and waltzes...
...full of memories. Enrico Caruso still seemed to him a "semi-god." He also bowed to Basso Chaliapin : "What a stage personality! I would never undertake Boris [Godunov] after Chaliapin." To Rothier, singers are different today, although since his retirement from the Met in 1939 he has tried to teach newcomers the old ways. "Nowadays," says he, "there are very few great voices because everybody is in such a hurry to become a star. They win a contest by singing one aria - and they are stars before they are ready...
This week, on CBS's We the People program, U.S. music-lovers were to hear for the first time how the great tenor sounded as a great basso. For, pleased with his prank, Caruso had made a recording a few weeks later. Only six prints had been run off and Caruso had ordered the master copy destroyed. Said he: "I don't want to spoil the bass business." But one of the prints had been preserved by Dr. Mario Marafioti, onetime Met physician and friend of Caruso, and Narrator Wally (Voices That Live) Butterworth had persuaded...