Word: puccini
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Thursday only. The third in the U.T.'s operatic sequence, this one Puccini's MADAME BUTTERFLY. In English...
Incapable of Ugliness. The Met's revival of Turandot, its first in 31 years, made up for much in the way of dull productions earlier in the season. Turandot (last syllable pronounced dot) remains the one Puccini work that appeals almost as much to the mind as to the heart. Writing for three years, under the shadow of death,* the composer was determined to move away from what he had come to regard as his earlier "slight" music. "Create for me something that will make the world weep," he instructed his librettists. In their adaptation of Carlo Gozzi...
...Puccini died in 1924, before having written what was to have been the opera's last, grandly clinching scene. The work was finished reverently but unimaginatively by Franco Alfano, a minor fellow composer and friend of Puccini...
Night Flights. The composer was introduced to the twelve-tone idiom in 1924 at the Florence premiere of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. "Only two people in the hall were impressed by the music," he recalls. "One was a very unimportant young man. Me. The other was Giacomo Puccini." Dallapiccola, who for a time composed in a largely traditional, tonal style (he has always been an ardent Wagner fan), gradually started learning twelve-tone technique, teaching himself by studying Schoenberg's scores. "But in those days nobody appreciated my music," and he and his wife were sometimes reduced...
Talented Local. In the opinion of Bindo Missiroli, an insurance broker who founded the Bergamo festival in 1937 (it was interrupted by the war), post-Puccini Italians of both the verismo and the twelve-tone school are "still the world's greatest opera composers. In Germany the modernists use the voice as another instrument, seldom giving importance to the word. Italians want to under stand what's going on." The biggest hit of the festival last week was the world première of a 143-year-old one-acter titled Pygmalion, composed not by a modern twelve...