Word: puccini
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...Almighty God touched me with His little finger," wrote Giacomo Puccini, "and said: 'Write for the theater . . .' I have obeyed the supreme command...
...lucrative concert tours, he managed to compose 20 musical melodramas, ending with a preposterous oriental olio called Mr. Wu that he left unfinished when he died in 1932. Most of his concoctions were unqualified flops, partly because Composer d'Albert had difficulty deciding whose horn he was tooting-Puccini's or Richard Strauss's. The only currently heard remnant of his life's work is Tiefland (1903). Often played in Germany and occasionally produced in the U.S., it has now been painstakingly embalmed by Epic...
...Puccini's Madame Butterfly has always suffered from a kind of triple cultural vision. Based on an American story (by John Luther Long) and play (by David Belasco), it tells what an Italian thinks an American would feel if he went ranching with a Japanese girl. Most of the time, this confusion is compounded by the staging. In the words of an old Far East hand, Cornelius V. Starr, Butterfly productions usually present "a kind of tourist Yokohama, or half New York Chinatown...
...characters no longer walk in mincing steps, or tuck their hands in their sleeves, movements characteristic of China rather than Japan. The fireflies that spangled the night sky during the love duet in Act I have been abandoned (there are no fireflies during the cherry-blossom season) ; though Puccini's gonglike orchestral effects are kept, the onstage gong that signaled the wedding is out (gongs are sounded at Japanese funerals). Cio-Cio-San no longer punches holes in the shoji (paper screen) walls of the house to watch for Pinkerton's return-for the good reason that...
...After Puccini. Composer Rossellini's Vortex, for which he wrote the libretto as well as the music, takes place in an unidentified "city of Central Europe" where factory workers are engaged in a hopeless revolt against the oppressive power of the state. Anna, the heroine (Soprano Clara Petrella), has lost her husband in the revolt, is separated from her children and her old friend Renato (Tenor Ferrando Fegrari). Anna escapes the soldiers assigned to crush the revolt, is briefly reunited with Renato, who becomes her lover. She tries to flee with him to America, but is arrested and shot...