Word: luisa
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Sopranos Lucrezia Bori, Alma Gluck, Lily Pons, Rosa Ponselle, Luisa Tetrazzini; Tenors Richard Crooks, Tito Schipa; Baritone Antonio Scotti; Basso Feodor Chaliapin; Pianist Josef Hofmann...
...rotten and bankrupt a monarchy as Europe had ever seen. Leprous beggars and pockmarked peasants scratched their lice and wallowed in filth unmatched since the Middle Ages. Degraded courtiers wasted themselves lewdly in fashionable excesses copied from the French court of Louis XVI. The harlot Queen Maria Luisa, a green-complexioned, toothless masterpiece of stale flesh, wore herself out with dissipation, while her doltish husband hunted serving wenches and rabbits. (Of Maria Luisa Napoleon said: "Her character is written on her face; it surpasses anything you dare imagine.") Spain's strong man was Don Emmanuel Godoy, a half-educated...
...money bags, barely escaped the ire of the Inquisition by labeling them with trite moral maxims. On the walls of churches he gave angels the faces of well-known prostitutes, growling as he did so: "I will cause the faithful to worship vice." He painted bag-bellied Queen Maria Luisa as a superannuated barmaid, made her portraits glow with the oily iridescence of decay. When he drew the peasants, soldiers, beggars and trollops who swarmed in Madrid's dusty streets, he was less subtle, but no less furious. When, on the bloody Second of May (1808) Napoleon...
...operas in which the heroine goes daft, is throttled, poisoned, knifed, or dies improbably of tuberculosis, along about 11 p.m. But in The Daughter of the Regiment, a coloratura has more chance for fun. The greatest singers of the last century-Jenny Lind, Adelina Patti, Marcella Sembrich, Luisa Tetrazzini-made the most of the chance, although the heft of the last two made the fun pretty heavy going. Lily Pons's principal worry is keeping her weight up to 105 lb., which she does by eating plenty of potatoes...
...Died. Luisa Tetrazzini, 68, most sensational coloratura soprano of opera's Golden Age, whose effortless bell-clear high F# made musical history; after a long illness complicated by grippe; in Milan. She never recovered from a cerebral hemorrhage last February, and for several days before her death was able to take no nourishment except an occasional sip of champagne...