Word: puccini
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Casa Ricordi owns an estimated 150,000 pieces of original sheet music, can furnish scores and orchestral parts of 2,000 operas and 500 symphonies. The firm discovered, nurtured and financed virtually every major composing talent in Italian opera, e.g., Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini, many of whose original manuscripts, for safekeeping, now lie crammed into 17 zinc cases, 45 feet below ground in a Milan bank. The House of Ricordi still publishes the works of many of the world's leading composers, including Francis Poulenc, Gian Carlo Menotti, Edgard Varese. Now 151 years old, the firm is making news...
...firing of singers, publicly castigated conductors. A pet hate for a time: Toscanini, whose style he once likened to a "mastodonic mechanical piano." Above all, Giulio commissioned Arrigo Boîto to write the librettos of Otello and Falstaff, which fired the aged Verdi into composing again. Although Puccini drew monthly advances for nine years before paying the money back, their friendship was sometimes stormy. "All composers," Giulio wrote him once, "French, English, German, Turkish and Abyssinian, [are] a bunch of idiots...
...music I have written up to now," said Giacomo Puccini, "seems a jest in comparison." He was speaking of his last and most ambitious opera, Turandot, which he left unfinished at his death in 1924. Completed by his friend Franco Alfano, Turandot is rarely performed despite the exotic splendors of its score. Chief reasons for its neglect: a certain harshness that sets it apart from the big Puccini favorites (Tosca, Bohème, Butterfly), some devilishly difficult vocal parts, and a need for sumptuous staging...
...most sought-after directors in Europe. She is an ardent admirer but not a disciple of Felsenstein, believes that his coldly analytical visions have no place in Milan's mistily sentimental house. Between them, Directors Felsenstein and Wallmann have done much to restore Puccini's fire-and-ice masterpiece to the fame it deserves...
...Puccini: Madame Butterfly (Anna Moffo, Cesare Valletti, Rosalind Elias, Renato Cesari. Fernando Corena; Rome Opera House Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf; RCA Victor, 3 LPs). A young cast attempts to filter the turgid dramatic tars so often found in Puccini's graceful "thread of smoke." as he called it. The result is a bright and bracing version, full of rarely realized charms. Soprano Moffo's Cio-Cio-San is vocally arresting, more woman than Japanese doll...