Word: scala
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When the small, dark-haired woman walked into Milan's La Piccola Scala, a stagehand took one look at her flushed, distracted face and called for the doctor. Her maid, hovering worriedly in the background, suggested a psychiatrist. Her husband was blunt: "Now I know what it's like to live with a madwoman." But three hours later, Soprano Graziella Sciutti, 29, was out before the curtain receiving one of the biggest ovations of her career. The part she had played to perfection: the title role in a rarely performed opera by Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816), Nina, ossia...
Died. Dimitri Mitropoulos, 64, virtuoso conductor and pianist who followed a musical calling with mystical fervor; of a heart attack; in La Scala Opera House, Milan. Athens-born of ecclesiastical lineage, Greek Orthodox Mitropoulos gave himself to music with the dedication of a monk (which he once intended to be), lived frugally, gave away his money to students as his hero St. Francis of Assisi did, became an apostle of modern composers. On the podium he danced, shook his fringed pate, conducting without a score from an awesome memory. Off the podium he read philosophy, the Greek dramatists...
...Nabucco failed at its premiere at La Scala in 1842, chances are that Verdi's career would have failed with it. His first opera, Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio, had been only a mild success, and the second, Un Giorno di Regno, had been hissed offstage by the opening-night audience. A year before he started work on Nabucco, Verdi had seen his two children and his wife die within 21 months of one another. Insisting that he would never write another opera, Verdi was drawn to Nabucco in spite of himself. After he reluctantly agreed to read...
...breed -some 500 new operas a year. Each year the best of the current Italian operatic product goes on display at a remarkable opera festival-the Teatro delle Novita, winding up its 17th season in the Alpine hill town of Bergamo, and known as the "gateway to La Scala...
...their operatic careers (a notable exception: Gian Carlo Menotti, who, says a friend, "found his Bergamo in America"). The two new works at this year's festival displayed the extremes of two warring contemporary Italian styles. The Admiral, by Arturo Andreoli, 58, a longtime coach at La Scala, was a typical example of verismo (an operatic movement comparable to literary "realism"), made popular in the late igth century by Mascagni, Leonca--vallo, Puccini. Based on a one-act play by Chekhov, the opera had to do with a )': drunken bum masquerading as an admiral at a wedding party...