Word: puccini
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Despite some indignation over this devotion to Composer Giacomo Puccini's realism of plot and tender score, the first performance of La Bohème was a success. The critics aloofly condemned Puccini for writing down to the mob. But there were 15 curtain calls. The great Giuseppe Verdi was notably absent, but Pietro (Cavalleria Rusticana) Mascagni and Ruggiero (Pagliacci) Leoncavallo, sitting in boxes, led the cheering. Tall, droop-mustached Giacomo Puccini, 37, tearfully embraced Toscanini. La Bohème, a work with a realistic human story,* has been one of the most popular operas ever since...
...cast of soloists (mostly Met stars) before the mikes like an old-fashioned singing class, so that he could keep a sharp eye and a firm baton on them. Tenor Jan Peerce, in the first act's duet with Soprano Licia Albanese, closed on a lower E (as Puccini wrote it) instead of the flashier high C he likes to exit on at the Met. Surprise star of the show was Toscanini's 20-year-old soprano find, Anne Me Knight (TIME...
...easily the best performance of La Bohème the U.S. has heard since Toscanini last conducted it at the Met in 1910. After it was over, Toscanini waved hastily to the shouting audience and scurried off, leaving the applause for the singers and his late friend, Puccini...
Then she told how it all happened. Toscanini, who had conducted the world premiere of Puccini's La Bohème in Turin in 1896, was to perform it again, on its 50th anniversary, over NBC. He had picked the Met's Licia Albanese for Mimi, Jan Peerce for Rodolfo. For the second feminine lead (Musetta) he had tried out 30 women, was satisfied with none. Then Met Conductor Wilfred Pelletier, who teaches at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, suggested a 20-year-old, plump, black-haired pupil of his, who so far had sung only...
Madame Butterfly was having its first showing since the Met packed it away in mothballs after Pearl Harbor, afraid that the public would resent watching B. F. Pinkerton, Lieutenant, U.S.N., caddishly deceive the Japanese girl Cio-Cio-San. Puccini's Pinkerton still sang...