Word: pit
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...favored it claimed such a merger would solve the financial difficulties besetting both organizations. By moving into the Metropolitan the Philharmonic would save the $75,000 rental it pays annually to Carnegie Hall. The quality of opera performances would be greatly improved if the peerless Philharmonic played in the pit and if the conductors were as expert as Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer or Arturo Toscanini...
...crowds which gathered in Philadelphia last week voted it the finest musical achievement of the U. S. season. The proud Philadelphia Orchestra played in the pit. On the stage was Lotte Lehmann, regarded by many as the greatest singer of the day. The opera, Der Rosenkavalier, was by Richard Strauss who has given the world more eloquent music than any composer now living...
...From the pit the Philadelphia players gave the score all its eloquence. Conductor Fritz Reiner is a masterful Strauss conductor. His clean direct beat kept the framework exact but he brought out all Strauss's slyness, curved the melodies so that their beauty was bewitching. Said Critic Lawrence Oilman in the New York Herald Tribune: "There has not been heard in this country such an exfoliation of the beauty and the riant comedy of Strauss's irresistible score...
Instead of an Italian melodrama crammed with deaths, the San Francisco opera opened with Smetana's folksy Bartered Bride. Soprano Elisabeth Rethberg sang clearly and cavorted like any plump Czech peasant girl. In the pit was bald old Alfred Hertz who conducted The Bartered Bride at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House before he went West to take over the San Francisco Symphony...
...good cause last week to worry over his budget. For years the San Francisco Opera ran no deficit. Last season there was one of some $30,000. Merola often undertakes a performance with next to no rehearsals; Hertz demands many. But as the solid old German stood in the pit last week, sweat gleaming from his bald pate, his beard pointing eagerly toward the stage. San Franciscans forgot all about dollars and deficits in the fine sweep of his orchestral performance...