Word: scala
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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...
...Hates. Casa Ricordi was founded in Milan in 1808 by a violinist who, so the legend goes, noticed that the workers around La Scala wore paper hats made of discarded musical scores. Giovanni Ricordi investigated, found that valuable scores and orchestra parts were stacked high in La Scala's cellar. He began to buy up some of the scores, set himself up as a copyist, got a contract stipulating that all the scores he produced would remain his property after a performance. In an age without copyrights or royalties on performances, he funneled some of his earnings back...
...organizational genius was Grandson Giulio, an ironic, meticulously dressed man, who dabbled in poetry and chamber music, negotiated so shrewdly that Casa Ricordi realized as much as 65% from the earnings of its composers' work. With a near-monopolistic control over Italian opera, Giulio attended rehearsals at La Scala, recommended the hiring or firing of singers, publicly castigated conductors. A pet hate for a time: Toscanini, whose style he once likened to a "mastodonic mechanical piano." Above all, Giulio commissioned Arrigo Boîto to write the librettos of Otello and Falstaff, which fired the aged Verdi into composing...
...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...
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...