Word: egiziaca
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...treatments for his "glass arm" had not kept Conductor Toscanini so long in Italy (TIME, March 14 et ante), the world première of his friend Ottorino Respighi's Maria Egiziaca might have caused more stir last week. Toscanini planned to direct the production. But instead Composer Respighi came. He relegated Philharmonic Symphony players to a dark corner of the Carnegie Hall stage. In their usual place a great gilt-framed triptych stood, spattered with stars and angels. Angels opened the triptych, disclosed three panels rudely painted to suggest a ship docked in the harbor of Alexandria...
Respighi meant his Maria Egiziaca to be mounted simply so as to suggest the old mystery plays. Mary of Egypt (German Charlotte Boerner) sang capably last week but, for the rest, the Philharmonic production was amateurish to a degree that Toscanini would never have tolerated. In his own miraculous fashion Toscanini might even have made the drab, derivative music take on color, sound significant...
...best Maria Egiziaca is not likely to become so popular as the Fountains of Rome and the Pines of Rome. When he started this famed cycle (1916) Respighi had a sure-fire formula fixed in his head. He would do a musical baedeker with gay, faintly comic descriptions, the kind of thing the Russians had taught him to write. He would write dreamy, sensuous interludes, great, glittering climaxes...
...Roman Festivals (third poem in the cycle) 45 performances. Royalties in such cases mount up. Respighi, Stravinsky and the later works of Richard Strauss are expensive to perform. The Philharmonic has to pay $40 each time it plays any one of the Roman poems. (For the privilege of Maria Egiziaca's première, the Philharmonic paid $500.) If the performance is broadcast, Columbia Broadcasting has to pay nearly as much again...
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