Word: fra
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Fra Gherardo, the poor Parman is a religious rebel who gives all his money to the poor and dares combat with the Church of Rome. He is not, however, entirely a saint. His lusts lead him to betray a sympathetic virgin who later returns to help him conduct his holy reforms. Gherardo, veering like a mediaeval Elmer Gantry between his passion for this girl and his passion for reform, is led at last to betray his followers in an effort to secure her release from jail. In this effort he fails. He watches her being strangled and is then carried...
Such is the tragic tale which Pizzetti has adorned with perhaps the most splendid music of his career. The opera was undoubtedly too long and it seemed to contain a superfluity of dialogue, of inactive interludes that were only vaguely melodic. Lyrical passages were few. Fra Gherardo was original mainly for its orchestration and for the thunderous, muttering chorus which reached its climax in a mob scene at the end of the third act. These choruses were unlike anything that Milanese operagoers had ever seen before. There was something terrible and true in that imitation of the angry shouted songs...
...lives now in almost ratlike retirement. His wife, a descendant of Stradivarius, is dead. He likes quiet and hates traveling; he was made sorrowful before the War when his enemies, on account of his "revolutionary" music, made him the object of belligerent slander. His most famed work previous to Fra Gherardo was Debora e Jaele, an opera about a Hebrew prophetess in which, as in the more recent work, Pizzetti made frequent use of a crowded stage and made his score the incentive for action rather than its purpose...
...Administrator Pablo F. Barbat; for the coming season he has secured the services of Gigli, Lauri-Volpi, Didur, Pinza, and Mme. Serafin-Rakowska of the Metropolitan; and of Maria Olczewska, Benvenuto Franci, Otto Wolf from various European companies. He plans to present Ildebrando Pizetti's new opera Fra Gherardo...
...French who fled from Grand Pré, Canada, in 1755. They are les Acadiens. Last week, like other distinguished Frenchmen before him, Ambassador Paul Claudel went there. "Vous êtes ici parmi les Français," a serious local dignitary told him. "Nos ancêstres sont fraçais, nos sentiments sont fraçais, notre religion est fraçais." It was so surprisingly true that the good Ambassador felt himself deeply touched...