Word: rossini
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This winter's program will offer him a chance to expand even further: later offerings will be Rossini's "A Turk in Italy"--never done here before--and "Carmen," which Goldovsky considers a great opera in spite of the depredations of Rita Hayworth and every other woman who ever held a rose in her teeth...
...nerves shaken from overwork, he wrote a friend that "music needs freshness . . . I am conscious of nothing but lassitude and crabbedness." He composed little, settled down in Paris to grow fat from his well-stocked wine cellar and his imported bolognas. When friends chided him for being lazy, Rossini replied: "I always had a passion for idleness...
...music and his personality had a sprightliness that led his admirers to call him "the Italian Mozart." Few musicians passed through Paris in the 1860s without paying their respects to the great Rossini. When Richard Wagner called, and tried to explain his newfangled ideas, Rossini told him grandly: "What you are saying is the funeral oration of melody...
...Rossini's own melodic funeral oration when he died, wealthy and honored at 76, made history of a sort. An ensemble of Adolphe Sax's new instruments was hired to play Beethoven's Funeral March-the first time that saxophones were ever used at a funeral...
...were no longer imaginary. He had spent 200,000 lire (about $560) to hire a hall and the Rome Opera House Orchestra to play in it. The orchestra management, touched by Abbati's earnestness, even knocked down the price. Included in his program: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Rossini's L'ltaliana in Algeri, the overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger. Said he: "I closed my eyes and there was my orchestra, the same one as at home. The music just flowed. Then I opened my eyes and saw a real orchestra before me. They played...