Word: italianized
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Tenor Transformed. For Italian Tenor Del Monaco, the evening marked an amazing transformation. Del Monaco's singing career got a major boost when he was a soldier in World War II: his music-loving C.O. let him sing instead of shipping him to the front. One performance, in Butterfly, brought him his big chance: a buxom soprano watched the tenor sweep up his fragile leading lady and carry her offstage. The visitor was fascinated. "You must come and do it with me in Florence," she burbled. Then and there, Del Monaco earned a reputation more for force than...
William Blake's sketch of a thief in the toils of a serpent was included in a collection of old masters' drawings at the Durlacher Gallery. It shows the British mystic at his most frightening. Blake learned Italian in old age simply to read Dante, illustrated The Divine Comedy both to complement and criticize Dante's philosophy. For Blake, hell was on earth, not in the afterworld, but still he found it real enough. In Blake's drawing of Brunelleschi, the attacking serpent is not so much an infernal punishment for Brunelleschi's thieveries...
...that he would no longer play Columbia Records' Mambo Italiano. Reason: he had been told that some Sicilian words in the lyrics, particularly the word for "cucumber" (spelled phonetically in the lyrics as "jadrool"), had a dirty meaning. Mitch Miller at Columbia Records promptly produced letters from an Italian-American priest and a professor of languages at New York University denying that the vernacular words used in the song "could possibly be construed as offensive to anyone." At week's end Block, still sticking by his ban, explained: "The lyrics are only wrong to people who know dirty...
Aida (Sol Hurok; I.F.E.). Italian film makers have released eight filmed operas to U.S. art houses in the past seven years. Some of them translated into fairly acceptable films. Aida, with its vivid Ferraniacolor, its monumental settings of ancient Memphis, its popular and dramatic music, its handsome acting cast and its standout (mostly invisible) singing cast, aims at being the grandest assault yet on U.S. eyes and ears...
...Aida, the eyes have it. Lest any of the plot be lost between the music and the Italian language, a discreet narrator explains each scene before it starts. Aida (Sophia Loren) is a slant-eyed, dusky-skinned, full-lipped Ethiopian slave girl in the Egyptian court. She and the stone-faced princess (Lois Maxwell) are in love with a weak-mouthed warrior named Radames (Luciano della Marra). Radames is sent off to trounce the Ethiopians and is rewarded, all against his will, with the hand of the princess. Torn between love and guilt, he slips Aida a top-secret battle...