Word: fabiani
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Academy of Music, famed Soprano Renata ('Diva Serena") Tebaldi stepped to the front of the stage and sang Ah, spietata from Handel's Amadigi. As the evening wore on, a suave, white-tied figure kept scurrying back and forth between the two programs: Aurelio ("Ray") Fabiani, promoter of both wrestling and music, was hard at work on both sides of show-business history...
Last week Fabiani, still presenting his usual weekly wrestling programs, proudly announced plans to bring an impressive roster of Metropolitan Opera stars to Philadelphia next season for opera performances. In his long career, 59-year-old Promoter Fabiani has also treated Philadelphians to professional tennis tournaments, midget auto racing, ice revues, plus such middlebrow musical fare as Mantovani's lush strings. With profits from these enterprises, he has given Philadelphia a new opera company, the Lyric, lured big-name singers with fat fees ($6.500 per recital for Tebaldi...
Naples-born Ray Fabiani, who was brought to the U.S. when he was three, and played violin with the Chicago Opera Co. when he was in his early 20s, tried his hand at concert management. But at the opera one evening, Jim ("The Golden Greek'') Londos, onetime heavyweight wrestling champion of the world, persuaded him that the real money was in the wrestling ring. Publicity-wise Ray Fabiani set up scholarships for young wrestlers (the recipients were sent to a muscle-building gymnasium), lured ex-Heavyweight Champion Joe Louis into a brief and unrewarding wrestling career, spiced...
...Since Fabiani turned back to music two years ago with the formation of the Lyric, he has been doing all his own casting, drawing mostly on the NBC Opera and the New York City Opera companies, borrowing scenery from Manhattan's City Center. With citywide billboard displays, he challenges Philadelphia's entrenched Grand Opera Co. So far. the Lyric has been no more daring in repertory, will present ten works next season, three of which will be contemporary: Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana (both to be conducted by Leopold Stokowski), and Carlisle...
...Fabiani still occasionally plays his Stradivarius, moves with ease through his two worlds. On the night of the Tebaldi recital, after presenting the singer with masses of long-stemmed roses, he drove to a local precinct to bail out two fans of Dropkick Rocca who had been jailed for assaulting the referee...