Word: scala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Among the operagoers who heard Italian Tenor Mario Del Monaco sing at Milan's La Scala last week was a blind woman named Irene Meyer, 33, from Gaithersburg, Md. Two years before, she had heard him sing Radames in Aïda at Manhattan's Metropolitan. Stricken with incurable diabetes, Irene told friends in Gaithersburg that what she wanted most of all was to hear Del Monaco once again. What happened could have happened only in the U.S., where people 1) form committees, 2) believe that dreams come true. Irene went to Milan on funds donated...
Conductor Leonard Bernstein was in a swivet. Traveling in Italy, he had agreed to conduct a regular performance of Milan's proud La Scala opera, a thing which no American had ever done before. He had five days in which to learn the score-Luigi Cherubini's Medea-but he had never conducted grand opera in his life and never even heard of Cherubini's Medea. To make things worse, he had a case of bronchitis. Finally, the score with which he had to work dated from 1797, and, like most old books, it gave off dust...
Nevertheless, the rehearsals went well. "The orchestra and I leaned the opera together," he says. Opera authorities gave him every break, canceled a conflicting rehearsal of Rigoletto to give him more time. A few hours before his curtain last week, Lennie was gripped by sinusitis, but La Scala medicos fussed over him, and the 35-year-old maestro apparently thrived on their treatment...
Chief credit for both the production and the coup belonged to Veteran Conductor Artur Rodzinski. La Scala had arranged with the Soviet Ministry of Culture to produce next season a revised version of the opera (on which, the ministry said, Prokofiev had been making "technical changes"). Conductor Rodzinski, who now lives in Florence, had an idea that he could beat La Scala to the punch. He remembered that the Metropolitan Opera had once planned to produce War and Peace and that Manhattan's Leeds Music Corp. had a copy of the score...
...sets, five of them elaborate"; and an Italian translation. Rodzinski tricked up musical interludes to connect a series of five short scenes in Act I. The countryside was scoured for singers willing to tackle an unfamiliar score. Total cost: close to $400,000. When Milan's La Scala (and the Soviet Embassy) protested, the Florentines retorted that Russia does not adhere to the International Copyright Convention-and kept on working...