Word: italianity
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...repertory includes 47 operas, including 17 German, 17 Italian, nine French, two U. S. and two Russian...
...second debutant, German Baritone Hans Hermann Nissen, with a traditional lock of property hair over his left eye like a well-bred Scottie, stalked woodenly as Wotan in Die Walküre. Judges gave him several points on power, few on subtlety. Two Italian sopranos were broken in on Puccini's sway-backed war horse La Boheme: Mafalda Favero who moped placidly as the tuberculous Mimi, and Marisa Morel who flounced her skirts and shrilled nervously as Musetta...
...been chewing its tenor arias with bare gums. Thirty years ago when the Met had Caruso, Bonci and Slezak, Tenor Bjoerling would have been as superfluous as a wisdom tooth. But as the French poet Rodolfo in La Boheme, Swede Bjoerling took his top notes in the best Italian manner. His hearers chortled as if they had never heard his like before...
Ignazio Silone's The School for Dictators (Harper, $2.50) is not written for those who like to play games. Tall, dark, 38-year-old Ignazio Silone, whose two novels (Fontamara, Bread and Wine) have been called the sum total of modern Italian literature, has had intense first-hand experience under a Fascist dictator. Editor of a labor paper in Trieste when Mussolini came to power, Silone was pursued by Black Shirts for three years (they killed his brother), escaped in 1931 to Switzerland, where he has since become Mussolini's most embarrassing critic...
...School for Dictators consists entirely of dialogues, between three characters. One, Silone's mouthpiece, is an exiled Italian Socialist nicknamed Thomas the Cynic, who, using mainly Italian and German sources, is writing a political treatise on the art of deception. He believes that "the deceivers have nothing to learn from it, while the deceived have." His pupils are two Americans: Mr. W., a well-known U. S. politician and ex-jazz musician, regarded as the coming U. S. dictator, and Professor Pickup, a decayed Billy Sunday sort of fanatic, who originated "Neo-Sociology...