Word: scala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Today, public fancy has turned to classical and pre-classical styles. Ever since World War II, the directors of Milan's huge (cap. 3,200) La Scala have tried to find a showcase for small-scale operas. First they bought property directly behind the stage, on the Via dei Filodrammatici (Street of the Amateur Actors), where once the carriages of the great prima donnas were parked. Plans were made to remodel a small apartment building into a tiny theater. Eventually, after five years of labor and some half a million dollars, La Piccola Scala (cap. 600) was finished...
Last week La Piccola Scala opened to an audience of Milan's biggest industrialists, severest critics, ranking socialites and reigning artists (including Soprano Maria
...Harvard-bred (A.B., '39) Leonard Bernstein first flashed into musical prominence as a composer (Fancy Free, Trouble in Tahiti, On the Town), and is regarded as one of the most talented of U.S. conductors. Two years ago, with five days' preparation, he directed Milan's La Scala orchestra in the seldom-staged Medea of Cherubini, starring Maria Callas. To composing and conducting, he added teaching at Tanglewood and Brandeis University, spends his spare moments with his wife, Actress Felicia Montealegre, and three-year-old daughter. He worries that he may be scattering his talent: "Diversification means...
...contest for the title of the world's greatest opera house, Vienna would probably lose to Milan's La Scala, and might have strong competition from New York's Metropolitan. But Vienna is the heart of Operaland, not only because it was an artistic home to generations of music's greats from Mozart to Richard Strauss, not only because it has devoutly performed opera for more than 300 years through occupation, war and famine, but because in a sense, all Vienna is an opera stage. The baroque palaces no longer signify military power or proud aristocracy...
...potentials of American society-and I do not feel like setting a limit on that." In Rockefeller Center, NBC President Pat Weaver (Phi Beta Kappa, Dartmouth '30) grows ever more expansive: "Television is as big as all outdoors. The whole country can visit the Vatican and La Scala at once. Our horizons are boundless...