Word: scala
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Puccini: The Heart of La Bohème (Orchestra of Milan's La Scala Opera, Umberto Berrettoni conducting, with Beniamino Gigli, Licia Albanese and others; Victor; 10 sides). An anthology containing practically all the brightest blossoms of Puccini's most popular opera, selected from Victor's previously released complete recording. The cast is brilliant, the singing rich in the best garlicky Italian tradition. Recording: good...
Feeling and Belief. Toscanini's personal fight with Fascism began in 1922, when he first defied a request to play Giovinezza at Milan's La Scala Opera House. When the Fascists started to agitate for control of La Scala's policies in 1929, Toscanini resigned as director. Two years later, at a concert in Bologna, the peppery little maestro again refused to conduct Giovinezza, saying publicly that, in his opinion, it was not music at all. After the concert a Fascist mob beat him up, Fascist authorities temporarily confiscated his passport, and the Fascist Party surrounded...
When the music-loving Milanese got the news of Mussolini's downfall, they promptly demonstrated before La Scala Opera House, loudly cried "Toscanini must open the new opera season" (TIME, Aug. 9). For twelve years Maestro Toscanini, most famous of all Italian antiFascists, had refused to conduct in Italy. Under his leadership (off & on from 1898 to 1925), La Scala had become a sort of Vatican of Italian opera, had never sounded the same since he left. Last week history put a period to Milanese hopes: the Italian Government reported that La Scala Opera House had been destroyed...
...They hoisted anti-war placards. They stormed the Cellari jail and freed a batch of political prisoners. The soldiers of the Crown refused to fire on them. Once a column of the people, remembering the exiled maestro who would not play Giovinezza, rushed down the arcaded streets to La Scala and before the famed Opera House chanted: "Where is Toscanini? He must inaugurate the new Scala season." Thousands went on strike in the factories of Pirelli (tires), Bianchi (trucks), Breda (tanks) and Marelli (electrical equipment...
...over, Pinza spent a brief spell as brakeman on a railroad, then got a chance to sing King Mark in Tristan und Isolde at the Teatro Reale dell' Opera in Rome. Soon his reputation was made. Arturo Toscanini gave him a contract at Milan's famed La Scala opera house. There the late impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza signed him for the Metropolitan. Last year, despite the fact that Basso Pinza had his first citizenship papers, the FBI got irritated at some patriotic Italian speeches he had made, interned him, but released him eleven weeks later...