Word: italian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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 is more famous, but the office building has done at least as much to shape the rhapsodic flow of Italian music. Its name: Casa Ricordi...
Casa Ricordi owns an estimated 150,000 pieces of original sheet music, can furnish scores and orchestral parts of 2,000 operas and 500 symphonies. The firm discovered, nurtured and financed virtually every major composing talent in Italian opera, e.g., Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini, many of whose original manuscripts, for safekeeping, now lie crammed into 17 zinc cases, 45 feet below ground in a Milan bank. The House of Ricordi still publishes the works of many of the world's leading composers, including Francis Poulenc, Gian Carlo Menotti, Edgard Varese. Now 151 years old, the firm is making news...
...firm, but the dynasty's organizational genius was Grandson Giulio, an ironic, meticulously dressed man, who dabbled in poetry and chamber music, negotiated so shrewdly that Casa Ricordi realized as much as 65% from the earnings of its composers' work. With a near-monopolistic control over Italian opera, Giulio attended rehearsals at La Scala, recommended the hiring or firing of singers, publicly castigated conductors. A pet hate for a time: Toscanini, whose style he once likened to a "mastodonic mechanical piano." Above all, Giulio commissioned Arrigo Boîto to write the librettos of Otello and Falstaff, which...
...Dogs. The last of the Ricordis to head the firm was Tito II, who expanded Casa Ricordi into the sprawling complex that now has branch offices in a dozen countries, and a chain of Italian retail stores. But Tito was unpopular and dictatorial, resigned in 1919. The business passed to Accountant Renzo Valcarenghi and Composer-Stage Designer Carlo Clausetti, whose sons now run the firm. Today Casa Ricordi is doing brisker business than ever, despite World War II bomb damage. The firm remains stiffly self-conscious about its artistic obligations, maintains a string of opera scouts throughout Italy. Says...
...flap-footed, tank-bearing skindivers have opened a new frontier in archaeology. Last week Piero Nicola Gargallo, 30, a skindiving Italian marquis, was telling how he found the ancient Etruscan seaport of Pyrgi. On the Tyrrhenian coast just north of Rome, the city is known from historical records, but only minor traces have been found on dry land...