Word: pagliacci
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...just another night at the opera. The bill: those old double-yoked war horses, Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci. Performed more than 200 times at the Metropolitan Opera, they were now rounding out a season that had only two more weeks to run. The casts were studded with familiar names, and in the pit was Fausto Cleva, veteran of the Met's Italian wing. But on this routine occasion the audience was treated to a beautifully sung, splendidly paced evening for which much of the credit went to two middle-aged American singers...
...Reszke, Albert Saléza and Georg Anthes, and such better-preserved stars as Lillian Nordica, Emma Eames, Johanna Gadski, Marcella Sembrich and Antonio Scotti. Every so often, the patient listener is suddenly rewarded by hearing the great voices shine through the surface fog-Scotti in Act II of Pagliacci, Melba in the Lucia di Lammermoor Mad Scene-with a beauty and authority that no failings of Mapleson's recording technique can mask...
Everybody told Sam Bernstein that his boy was a born musician?which was exactly what Sam was afraid of. He thought of the musicians he had known as a boy in Russia as klezmer, the ghetto pagliacci, living from one free meal to the next, and he shuddered for his son's future...
Toscanini knew his limitations. Most of the cerebral music of the neoclassicists and the modernists, he said simply, is "not music for me." He was never notably a pioneer, though he introduced some of the music of his contemporaries (Pagliacci in 1892, La Bohème in 1896, the first performances in Italy of Wagner's Götterdämmerung and Siegfried). His abiding interest was "to come closer to the secrets of Beethoven and a few other eternal masters." For the majority of musicians, music lovers and critics the world over, he came closer to realizing...
Author Fuchs's three stories are lit with flashes of gallows humor, particularly Twilight in Southern California, in which an egocentric Pagliacci of the novelty business grimaces and clowns his way through a party while his firm takes the long slide into bankruptcy. The finance company has his Cadillac; creditors are massing like enemy battalions; the money men don't answer their phones when he calls-and the harried businessman responds like a hermit in the grip of a mystical experience: "He saw it all. He couldn't stop talking. He would get his backing, he would...