Word: scala
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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...
...captors that he was one of the last prisoners released. Ten years ago the Berlin Municipal Opera hired him on the spot after only a brief audition. Today he is booked solid two years in advance, has turned down offers from the San Francisco Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala. He is one of the rare singers who can perform in lieder and in opera equally well. To Fischer-Dieskau, lieder are often vocally more of a challenge than opera. "In Winterreise,'' he says, "you have more than an hour of emotion without pause. But the role of Amfortas...
What followed was the famed "War of the Sopranos," with La Scala the battleground. While Callas bit off larger and larger chunks of the Scala repertory, Tebaldi withdrew completely. To a friend she said: "Two cocks are too many for one chicken coop...
Nevertheless, it looks now as if Tebaldi and not Callas will eventually occupy Milan's chicken coop. In a fit of fury at the accumulated grievances she felt she had suffered, Callas last spring fired off a statement that she and La Scala were through Tebaldi, operating on the somewhat confused principle that she did not want to "sing against anybody," refused to move in to take Callas' place. This season La Scala has neither one of them, but the betting is strong that Tebaldi will be back in Milan by next season. Recently, when Elsa Maxwell suggested...