Word: intolleranza
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...from a fine Cinderella to a terrible Carmen. Opera companies in other cities tirelessly found out-of-the-way things to do, for instance, the Kansas City production of Handel's 241-year-old Julius Caesar and the Boston premiere of Italian Composer Luigi Nono s starkly modern Intolleranza...
Luigi Nono is a gentle man - until provoked. Then, he says, he writes music. Provoked by "neo-Nazism," the "Algerian struggle for liberty" and racial discrimination, among other things, he composed Intolleranza 1960, an opera of social protest that has done some wholesale provoking of its own. Its première in Venice four years ago was interrupted by a hail of stink bombs from the gallery and cries of "This opera makes me sick!" Nono's followers shouted back "Cretins!" "Dirty Fascists!" in a riotous uproar that even for Italy was, as one critic shuddered, "as ugly...
Last week the adventurous Boston Opera produced Intolleranza for the first time in the U.S.-and right from the beginning there was provocation aplenty. First, Nono's application for a visitor's visa to the U.S. was denied because he is a member of the Italian Communist Party. Two Boston newspapers and a committee of 65 U.S. musicians and composers protested and got the State Department to change its mind. Nono arrived two weeks late, demanded so many last-minute changes that the opening was postponed for two days. Once the curtain went up, however, Intolleranza proved...
...Intolleranza is a politically inspired work, but its brotherhood-of-man theme is basic Sunday school rather than party dogma. More important, it represents a significant step in developing a new language for modern opera. And for one at least, the language of Intolleranza carried a very special meaning. Jan Skalicky, the costume designer for the Boston production and son of a former Czech consul to the U.S., announced at week's end that he was defecting...
| 1 |