Word: gallis
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Died. Amelita Galli-Curci, 81, Italian-born coloratura soprano, one of the last survivors of the "golden age" of opera singers, a tiny Milanese with a flutelike voice who was a sensation at her 1908 debut in Rigoletto at Trani (a provincial Italian town where she was paid $60 a month), moved to the U.S. in 1916 to sing the great coloratura roles (Rosina, Lucia, Lakmé) with both the Metropolitan and Chicago Operas earning up to $15,000 a performance while on tour, retired in the 1930s to California but continued through her many recordings to haunt opera buffs...
...first let her voice get hard and edgy in the climaxes. Even so, her phrasing was such a delicate tracery of lovely lights and shades that the other singers sounded colorless by comparison. In the last act, she finally showed why she is compared with such legendary sopranos as Galli-Curci and Claudia Muzio: she sang parts of Willow, Willow, the Ave Maria, and particularly her dying phrases, with ravishing warmth and richness...
...world's great sopranos, La Scala's U.S.-born Maria Meneghini Callas, made her U.S. debut in Chicago last week. It was a rouser. recalling Chicago's greatest operatic days with Mary Garden and Galli-Curci...
...make up his mind to become a singer until he was 24. He took to music as soon as he was big enough to crank up his mother's phonograph in Celeste, Texas. But he liked the violin music on those old records better than the vocals of Galli-Curci and Caruso. When he was twelve, he coaxed his mother into giving him a year's worth of violin lessons. Twelve penny-pinching years later, he concluded that his fingers were too stubby. Then a Philadelphia singing teacher told him he had a voice...
...Vienna, she had heard that the Metropolitan was a harsh house, so big that a singer could not move around onstage without sacrificing her voice. The hallowed ghosts of the Met were all around her. How would she measure up to the great Gildas of the past-Sembrich, Melba, Galli-Curci...