Word: scala
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Through the grey streets early the following morning, a crowd walked behind the hearse to La Scala where 20,000 people were waiting. For two hours, housewives, dignitaries, workingmen, schoolboys, aged musicians filed through the gleaming foyer past the coffin lying in state under La Scala's crystal chandeliers. Then the visitors left and silently clustered about loudspeakers outside; inside the vast empty house, La Scala's 120-man orchestra played the Funeral March from Beethoven's Eroica for its old master. Later, the coffin rested in the glow of candles and the glare of television...
...ground through parliamentary machinery, virtually every musician and official of an opera-owning town began to berate the government. In Naples and Milan, the ballet troupes, orchestras and choral singers threatened with fine Italian logic to strike if they were fired. Opera leaders predicted the imminent closing of La Scala and other houses for lack of funds. Government opponents in the Senate feared a loss of tourist trade. (Said one opera stage director: "Tourists come to Italy to see the Pope, the Colosseum and opera. Next they'll tear down the Colosseum to make a parking lot.") The Communist...
...Audit in Paradise. The real issue was not top talent or a top house like La Scala. Virtually all opera companies outside the U.S. are publicly subsidized (London's Covent Garden gets $700,000 annually). La Scala's $1,200,000 subsidy is not out of line considering its box-office take of $2,000,000 and its ambitious program: 180 annual performances of 30 different operas, including eight new productions and four premiered works, plus concerts and ballets. More extravagant was the $1,200,000 subsidy to the Rome Opera in 1955, when it took in only...
Interviewed about Lennie, I said I admired greatly his guts and nerve, which some of the Philharmonic musicians called hutzpa. This, for instance, he displayed when conducting (probably for the first time in his life) Puccini's La Boheme at La Scala and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the orchestra and chorus of Santa Cecilia in Rome. I did not make any remarks about Bernstein's hip movements while conducting Beethoven's Ninth...
...Orietta Moscucci; Orchestra and Chorus of the Rome Opera conducted by Vittorio Gui). Known chiefly as a poet and mighty librettist (Verdi's Otello and Falstaff), Boïto always remained an interesting oddity as a composer; he premiered his version of Goethe's Faust at La Scala in 1868 only to see it booed off the stage after two performances because of its experimentation with Wagnerian techniques. Intellectually more challenging than Gounod's lovely but un-Faustian version, more dramatic than Berlioz' rambling opéra de concert, it suffers from a tendency to bombast...