Word: falstaffs
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...Either accept my conditions or burn the score. I will prepare the fire, and I will personally put Falstaff and his stomach on the flames." So wrote fiery-tempered, 79-year-old Composer Giuseppe Verdi in a letter to his publisher in 1892. But Verdi, who had already received one of the handsomest premiums ever offered a composer, was persuaded not to burn Falstaff. Along with the originals of Verdi's 26 other operas, it was long stored in Milan in a plain brownstone office building at No. 2 Via Berchet, not far from La Scala. The opera house...
...also marred by trivia, such as a kind of witches' cancan in the first scene. The libretto (by Verdi, put into verse by Francesco Piave) dimly reflects some of the original's greatness, but it is far behind Librettist Arrigo Boito's Otello and Falstaff, and is essentially a choppy, ill-balanced synopsis. The Met's production, while brilliant in most respects, was faulted by some ludicrous details and a kind of Teutonic touch that is alien both to Verdi's Italian music and to Shakespeare's Scottish setting...
Fischer-Dieskau is also one of the most consistently popular opera singers in Germany; aided by an imposing 6-ft. 2-in. figure, he has shaped a number of moving characterizations, e.g., Wolfram in Tannhäuser. Sir John Falstaff, and the title role in Busoni's Doktor Faustus. Even more surprising than the scope of his success is the fact that he had no early singing experience: he took his first voice lesson when he was 16, had scarcely started to sing professionally when he was drafted into the German army. As an American prisoner...
...finally, Falstaff left. He had dug deep-seeking dry-rot in his soul's garden and found nothing, so he changed scenes, joined the two percent, went abroad. And there he is today, still delightfully happy, ever hunting misfortune, bearing always the curse of the modern Cain--a horrible isolation in his happiness...
...enlighteners in Cambridge. (The stamps change color, but the message remains the same.) Harvard life is otherwise very much as before. His old roommates use the percolator now, his friends have divided the records, and if interested you can find the Charles Addams on Lamont's fifth floor, forever Falstaff's favorite on campus spot...