Word: milan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wojnowski, Poland's consul in Milan, Italy, was a bit subtler about it but he had the same general idea. A studious, courteous, bespectacled book collector, he had never been very happy in his consulate. Last summer, after a trip home, he cut out meat, ate only tea and toast for supper and gave up buying books. Staffers wondered why he was saving his pennies. Last week they found...
...Rome a fortnight ago, two music critics fought a duel over their critical opinions, left the field of honor only after one was pinked in the arm. Last week, a soprano at Milan's famed La Scala bopped a critic for having written that she was "suffering from a slight vocal eclipse" in a performance of Aïda. Next day, the Milan Journalists Association condemned opera singers who assault music critics, praised the "chivalrous" music critic for not hitting back...
...last seats in Milan's La Scala opera house sold for $40 twenty minutes before curtain time last week. All of Milan society was there, in rustling silks, jewels and white ties; high above the first red-brocaded boxes sat elderly retired musicians in shiny, worn evening clothes. In all, 3,500 had jammed in to welcome their favorite son back to Milan...
...lovers in the peanut galleries leaned over the rails to hiss the buzz-buzz in the parquet into silence. Then, in the still, warm, muggy air (two women in the crowded audience fainted), they listened for three hours to the romantic music of Poet-Musician Arrigo Boito, whom all Milan was honoring on the 30th anniversary of his death...
Toscanini and Boito had wept together at the first piano reading of Nerone. But when Boito orchestrated it, Toscanini felt the orchestration faulty, and said so. They quarreled. Years later, Toscanini heard that Boito was dying in an obscure clinic in Milan; he arrived too late to see him alive. Toscanini spent two years finishing the orchestration of Nerone and gave its first performance at La Scala in 1924. But, say Toscanini's friends, he has always felt that he had failed his onetime comrade...