Word: scala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...already received one of the handsomest premiums ever offered a composer, was persuaded not to burn Falstaff. Along with the originals of Verdi's 26 other operas, it was long stored in Milan in a plain brownstone office building at No. 2 Via Berchet, not far from La Scala. The opera house is more famous, but the office building has done at least as much to shape the rhapsodic flow of Italian music. Its name: Casa Ricordi...
...grand'mère of telephone dramas, Jean Cocteau's one-act, one-character play The Human Voice (1930) returned last week in a fine musical version by French Composer Francis (Dialogues of the Carmelites) Poulenc. Staged in Milan's La Piccola Scala, with shimmering Soprano Denise Duval as the distraught mistress, Poulenc's opera lifted the play again to the lyric tragedy that Cocteau intended: "The worst tragedy that can happen to us all-love and abandon...
Fiery Diva Maria Callas, her flames fairly well banked, rested in Milan before filming some jovial chit-chat for CBS Pundit Ed Murrow's TV talkathon, Small World. Meanwhile, back at her lawyers' office, things were less restful. Already soprano non grata at Milan's La Scala and Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, litigious Maria tossed a damage suit against another offending management: the Rome Opera House, which sacked her a year ago (TIME, Jan. 20, 1958) after she walked out after the first act of Norma pleading a "lowering of the voice." With a hint that...
Last week two of the world's leading opera houses-East Berlin's Komische Oper and Milan's La Scala-were performing brilliant and strikingly different productions of Turandot. According to the libretto, Chinese Princess Turandot is a creature of "ice which gives fire," and the productions mirrored the icily realistic and warmly romantic visions of two master directors of opera: East Berlin's Walter Felsenstein, Vienna's Margherita Wallmann...
While East Berlin's Turandot emphasized the oriental barbarity of the libretto, La Scala's version brought out its fairytale quality and its atmosphere of Eastern mystery. The sets were high and airy, often lighted with foggy uncertainty to give the illusion of immensely stretching space. The cast moved with the highly stylized, mincing grace of the traditional Chinese theater. The opera's few moments of pure horror, as when the executioner carries in the head of the Prince of Persia in Act I, were so skillfully blended into the fabric of stage movement that they were...