Word: scala
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...into windy Rockefeller Plaza without coat or hat, Toscanini caught a cold. He insisted, despite a fever, on conducting his Sunday broadcast. Against his wishes, a doctor was called, and bundled the Maestro into bed. The doctor made Toscanini cancel his scheduled flight to Milan to open the La Scala opera season. Toscanini is fatalistic about death-he believes he will probably be killed in an accident-and scorns such medical precautions. Says he: "If you don't want to be sick, you don't have to be sick...
Neither Kirsten Flagstad nor the Italian cops knew what to expect. In Milan last week 200 plainclothesmen were sprinkled through the audience in famed La Scala opera house, and outside, strong police squads stood ready. There had been hints of trouble. The former chief of staff of the Milanese partisan organization demanded that the performance of Tristan und Isolde be canceled. He objected not to Soprano Flagstad's much-criticized war reputation-but to the fact that the opera would be sung in German...
...increasing numbers of people who only cared that Kirsten Flagstad was a great singer. Some of them had heard her at first with reticence and then with applause in postwar concerts at Cannes, Paris and London. Many more of the same kind of folk were on hand at La Scala when the first notes of Tristan und Isolde sighed from the orchestra...
...Toscanini for comparisons. And on stage, 51-year-old Kirsten Flagstad, who had never before sung at the Milan opera house, thrilled the audience with the range, clarity and richness of her tones. Cried one critic: "This performance will go down in the annals as one of La Scala's greatest...
...Congress Hotel, Prima Donna Mafalda Favero of Milan's famed La Scala washed shirts for Baritone Danilo Checchi, who was stopping at another hotel. Favero pawned some of her jewelry, cried: "The first time I go to the jewelers to sell and not to buy. Maybe I get a mask and gun and go out Chicago style to get some money. This experience never was in the program...