Word: opera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Dressing-Room Drill. On his birthday they were just rehearsing for Toscanini's opera broadcast of the season-the riproaring, tearfully tender music of Verdi's Aida. The music meant something special to the maestro. He had conducted it in his Rio de Janeiro debut almost 63 years ago as a beardless bambino, and in his U.S. debut at Manhattan...
...Paleface. Bob Hope in a comic horse opera (TIME...
...Metropolitan has been trumpeting a good deal about its new opera, Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes." I suspect that the fanfare has been, at least in part, an attempt to cover its neglect of modern opera, for "Grimes" seems to be the only work in the current repertoire that is less than 30 years old. This is not wholly the fault of the Met, since it has staged several unsuccessful premieres in recent decades; the empty seats in the Opera House Thursday night showed that the responsibility also lies with the public. But the Met has not gone...
...Peter Grimes" was commissioned by the Kousscvitzky Foundation in 1945 and received its first performance under Boris Goldovsky's direction at Tanglewood in 1946. It takes a turn back to pre-Wagnerian opera with recitative and arias. The orchestra is subordinated to action on the state, though, judging by Thursday night's performance, Conductor Emil Cooper must think the opposite. The music is full of the sea--powerful and unsympathetic. It is a fine mood setting for the vicious fishing village, and Grimes' proscription by the other inhabitants is well portrayed. There are several numbers which stand out: the quartet...
...Grimes" is not a very good argument for opera in English, and it cannot fall back on the translation excuse. The fault lies with librettist Montagu Slater. He doesn't seem to think in musical terms, so that there is a lot of pretty tedious recitative, much of which is superfluous. The verbosity has apparently proved too much for Britten, for his music, though following thought and mood, does not fit the words very skillfully. This failing was exaggerated Thursday night by poor diction on the part of both soloists and chorus...