Word: donizetti
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...theme would have appealed to any opera composer from Donizetti to Kurt Weill: money and love. But particularly the former, since as Somerset Maugham put it, "In the end. all passions turn to money...
Columbia dips into Donizetti's over flowing old trunk of 70-odd operas and comes up with a 3-LP recording of Linda di Chamounix (mono). Written late in the composer's life, the work has a good deal of facile melody, and Antonietta Stella, Renato Capecchi and Cesare Valletti give it a rousing performance. But the libretto, which has to do with a girl driven mad when wrongly accused of being a wanton, is enough to shake anybody but the staunchest Donizetti...
...Covent Garden production of Medea was the same one in which Callas triumphed in Dallas last year (TIME, Nov. 17); in an exchange agreement, Dallas will see the Royal Opera Company's production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor next year. As curtain time approached in London, $5.60 seats were fetching $98 on the black market, and $30 boxes were going for $280. Shipping Magnate Aristotle Onassis, realizing that the occasion was a great night for the Greeks (Callas, Designer John Tsarouchis, Stage Director Alexis Minotis, not to mention Euripides), desperately placed ads in the London Times agony...
...Work on Donizetti's last opera, Il Duca d'Alba, was interrupted by the composer's insanity, and the score remained unfinished at his death in 1848. Completed by Journeyman Composer Matteo Salvi, it had its premiere in Rome in 1882, was rarely heard after that. Conductor Schippers, of the Metropolitan Opera, spent eight months unscrambling the "blurred, impossible handwriting" of the original score, shaved away Salvi additions, reconstructed most of the originally proposed ending from Donizetti's own figured bass and some solo sketches. What he arrived at was, said Schippers, "pure Donizetti and pure...
...chief wonder of Alba was that Donizetti's music again surmounted the absurdities of plot. In last week's production the orchestra sailed in whirlwind rushes through Donizetti's lush score; as whispered duets and trios alternated with bellowed choruses, the opera built to its lyrical climax in Act II with a love duet for Amelia and Marcello. Critics found the duet as fine as anything in Lucia di Lammermoor, proclaimed Alba "worthy of Donizetti's genius." But they reserved their warmest praise for 29-year-old Conductor Schippers, who had triumphed, one wrote, "with...