Word: montemezzi
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Tall, grey, bony Italo Montemezzi, 65-year-old Italian composer, is a one-good-opera man.* Montemezzi's opera, written in 1913, is L'Amore del Tre Re (The Love of Three Kings). It is a chronicle of ancient tabloid-headline love: a king's wife and a handsome lover; a compassionate husband; a wise, blind, bearded oldster poking about in the background. It is old stuff to sophisticated opera fans, but Montemezzi's surging, glowing score is as Italian as ravioli, and one of the best of its kind since Verdi. Last week Composer Montemezzi...
Goldilocked Soprano Grace Moore, who has announced that she will retire after the war, "to help with the reconstruction work that must follow," sang Fiora, the ove of two of the three kings. Chicago had heard her in the part, but for her, the Met and Montemezzi, it was a belated reunion, [n 1923, when Soprano Moore was in the Music Box Revue, Montemezzi coached her for a Metropolitan audition, and she vowed that some day she would sing in his opera. Well she sang it, but she postured in stained-glass attitudes, walked in the gait of a woman...
Musically, the most notable Chicago operas were two performed last week: Richard Strauss 's Salome, blazingly conducted by Artur Rodzinski; and the best of modern Italian works, The Love of Three Kings, conducted by its Composer Italo Montemezzi. Best opera in English was Verdi's Falstaff, retranslated from the Italian to sound something like Shakespeare. Baritone John Charles Thomas patterned his make-up from a Falstaff beer advertisement, said "Falstaff is just a plain red-nosed comedian to me," acted that way. He got one of his laughs by singing, right out, "Go to hell...
When Composer Italo Montemezzi wrote L'Amore dei Tre Re, Poet Sem Benelli provided him with a libretto which cried for music of exquisite passion and tenderness. The fact that parts of it recall the music of Tristan & Isolde never seemed important. Montemezzi's score has surge and spontaneity of its own, enough to arouse high hopes for his one-act La Notte di Zoraima (The Night of Zoraima), given its U. S. premiere last week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House...
...content. Choruses had momentum but little real vitality. The love music was pallid and unaffecting compared with L'Amore, where Fiora forgets even the stalking blind king who she knows is coming to kill her. In a box last week sat Mary Garden, greatest of Fioras, with Signora Montemezzi, whose husband would appear more & more to be a one-opera composer...