Word: tosca
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Opera House, unscathed though the Royal Palace next door had suffered three bomb hits, had scarcely missed a performance since the war started. Last week Neapolitans and United Nations troops jammed the house, at a $2 top, to hear such fine voices as that of Pina Esca, who sings Tosca as few divas since the palmy days of Mary Garden and Geraldine Farrar...
Enrico Caruso remained a highly informal character. Once when Lillian Nordica was about to lift her voice in a love duet with him, he deposited a hot potato in her hand. In Tosca, when Antonio Scotti stooped to pick up the paint brush beneath Cavaradossi's easel, he had to yank at it for minutes-Caruso had nailed it to the floor. Caruso's most celebrated peccadillo led to his arrest on the complaint of a Mrs. Hannah Graham who had run into him at the Central Park Zoo and testified breathlessly: "He insulted me. He brushed against...
...that the lovely Floria Tosca asked was a safe-conduct pass for herself and her lover to leave the country. Her wiles and her entreaties had failed. At last she had promised her body. Baron Scarpia, Chief of Police in Rome, smiled. He gave an order that the girl's lover be saved by a mock execution, then signed a safe-conduct pass...
Last week Parisians wildly applauded this scene in a performance of Puccini's opera La Tosca. They found in it an emotional release from their own pent-up bitterness and frustration under police tyranny. And never, they said, had the role been acted so realistically. It never had. The curtain did not rise again. Neither did the Baron. Petit Parisien reported that in the excitement of the performance the villain had actually been stabbed...
...Rigoletto with the San Francisco Opera, decided it wasn't his field. ∙ ∙ Sonja Henie was finally sworn in as a U.S. citizen. ∙ ∙ Reporting that she had been booed in Rio, on the street, at the opera door and on the stage as Tosca, Grace Moore said the booers were a Nazi-Fascist claque led by an Italian opera star whom she declined to name. ∙ ∙ 20th Century-Fox hired Salvador Dali to stage a special scene-a nightmare sequence showing "what runs through the mind of an inebriate...