Word: puccini
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Borrowing from your own, or some other nation's, storehouse of folk music is an old composer's trick. Dvorak and Puccini used U.S. tunes. Tchaikovsky not only reworked Russia's own Song of the Volga Boatmen but borrowed a bar or two from Italian music. Ravel, Chabrier and Rimsky-Korsakov took from the Spanish; Aaron Copland from the Mexicans. Last week the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. decided to work each other's musical gold mines officially...
...maestro said, "it is the same." The no-piece orchestra was not quite the same at first; Toscanini drilled them firmly, but with none of his usual wrathful outbursts. On opening night they played as they had not for years. Toscanini had chosen an all-Italian program (Rossini, Verdi, Puccini) of the kind of kettledrum-banging bravado that he likes. When he played Verdi's Te Deum, the audience got to its feet and shouted enthusiastically...
...assailant is mortal or ectoplasmic, but it sees a first-rate flagellation and a ghostly murder before the curtain rings down. Every word of Menotti's English libretto had the merit of being understandable, and some of the atmospheric horror music was more blood-curdling than Puccini...
...Order of Knighthood, first class.* For ten years she was the operatic toast of Europe's gayest capital. Her tall (5 ft. 7 in.) figure was as trim as a dressmaker's model, and as muscular as a middleweight champion. For her combined vocal and physical prowess Puccini named her his "greatest Tosca," Strauss his "greatest Salome...
Mahler had few good words for his contemporaries. Of Puccini he said (after a performance of Tosca): "Nowadays any bungler orchestrates to perfection"; of Sibelius: "The most hackneyed clichés were served up with harmonizations in the 'Nordic' style"; and of Strauss: "A heap of slag...