Word: puccini
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Twenty-four years ago, when Arturo Toscanini conducted the world premiere of Giacomo Puccini's unfinished opera, Turandot, he abruptly stopped the show in the middle of the third act-at the point Puccini had reached when he died. In what was to Toscanini a perfectly adequate explanation, he turned to the audience in Milan's La Scala and announced simply, "Here Puccini ended his opera." He refused to go a note farther on that occasion, even though he admitted that Puccini's fellow composer Franco Alfano had done a good job of completing the score. Conductors...
Sensual & Sinister. Last week, Baritone Schoeffler capped his first season at the Met with a crack performance of the sensual and sinister Scarpia in Puccini's Tosca. When he was onstage with his longtime Vienna State Opera friend, red-haired Soprano Ljuba Welitch (as Tosca), the audience saw and heard the kind of sure, smooth action and singing that make Vienna's ensemble just about tops in the operatic world...
...story of Turandot comes from the same shop as Prokofiev's delightful The Love for Three Oranges, but it is a far less juicy piece of fruit. Puccini's librettists, like Prokofiev, took their story from an 18th Century "fable," i.e., play, of Count Carlo Gozzi, who in turn had been inspired by a Chinese-Persian legend about a beautiful but petulant princess of ancient Cathay. The princess announces she will marry any man of noble blood who can answer three riddles; if he misses an answer, he loses his head...
When Anna-Lisa, still slim and pretty at 38, sang her first aria, from Puccini's Gianni Schicci, her bright-colored soprano was tight and quivering with nerves. It loosened up in arias from Gounod's Romeo and Juliet and Charpentier's Louise. By the time she had sung duets from La Boheme and Romeo with Jussi, she had proved she had something more than a talented amateur's equipment, if something less, after too many years away from public singing, than a professional way of using it. She would get a chance to correct that...
...Menotti score, composed for small orchestra (25 pieces), was always distinctive if not always distinguished. As in The Medium, Menotti proved himself a master at writing Puccini-like melodrama and composing melody with Puccini-like appeal. His hair-raising stage directions-touches such as the smashing of a window-pane-startled listeners more than once. And he had not lost any of his flair for the macabre: in one scene, a magician hypnotizes his fellow visa-seekers, commands them into an eerie waltz in the consulate office. In Magda's dying dream, the same characters dance again in coffin...