Word: scala
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When Maria Barrientos died in 1946, her wealthy porteño friends paid for Maria Helena's lessons with Luis Ricci, who had once been at La Scala...
...Helena knows that early success does not always make a career. She plans to keep on studying, hopes some day to sing at La Scala or the Met. Said she last week: "I might go a long way if I don't hurry...
...there the glistening blue cars sat for four hours, caught in a snarl of bureaucratic red tape. Paris had forgotten to order the Hendaye station master to let the train through, and he liked to have his orders. Sixty of the passengers, members of Milan's La Scala Opera, volubly wondered if they would get to Lisbon in time for their performance of Rigoletto. Paris finally sent "a thousand regrets," and the express rolled...
Giuseppe Verdi, a formidable old man in his 70s, looked sternly down on the four cellists. In rehearsal for the first performance of his new opera, Otello, the La Scala orchestra had just reached the important cello passage in the first act. The second cellist, a 19-year-old boy, could barely be heard. The composer demanded to know his name. "Toscanini," he was told. Toscanini had played the passage exactly as it was marked-pppp. Patiently, Verdi explained that the fault was his own: he really intended only pianissimo, and had exaggerated his directions to make sure that they...
...singers, rehearsed them relentlessly in his dressing room, accompanying them on the piano himself. There were few big bright names in his cast-he preferred to use singers he could mold in his own way: stressing first expressiveness, then diction, and lastly voice. He had heard the Philadelphia La Scala Soprano Herva Nelli sing last summer, and announced, "This is Desdemona." She told him she had never sung the role. Toscanini snapped: "Good. I'll teach you myself." He drilled the Metropolitan's brilliant new baritone, Giuseppe Valdengo (a graduate of the New York City Opera...