Word: toscaninis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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 again. Although Puccini drew monthly advances for nine years before paying the money back, their friendship...
...Conductor Barbirolli, born in London of an Italian father and French mother, drew the overpowering assignment of succeeding Arturo Toscanini at the New York Philharmonic. Despite previous conducting posts in London, Leeds and Glasgow, it was too much, too soon. For seven lean years, Barbirolli tried to impose his rather romantic conducting style on the Philharmonic, while the strong-willed orchestra seemed determined to play as it pleased. Mounting criticism finally forced Barbirolli to leave...
Angel Voice. Much has happened to bolster her ego in the twelve years since Toscanini boosted her to fame by making her part of the great, emotion-charged concert that marked the postwar reopening of La Scala. The Maestro conceded that she sang with "the voice of an angel...
...before and after the end of World War II, Tebaldi and her mother shuttled from one small town to another. During that period, Tebaldi made her operatic debut (as Helen of Troy in Boito's Mefistofele) in Rovigo; on the way there, fighter planes strafed her train. After Toscanini hired her for the Scala opening in 1946, she smoothly embarked on the international operatic circuit. In her rise to the top she has experienced only one real failure-a performance of Traviata at La Scala in 1951 in which her voice broke twice on high notes. The audience...
...singer, Enrico Caruso, made his debut in Rigoletto in 1903, sang 607 performances of 36 operas in the next 17 seasons, and transformed the Met into a genuinely popular house. Soprano Geraldine Farrar, trailed by a worshipful female fan club of self-styled "gerryflappers," reigned with him. But Arturo Toscanini, with Gustav Mahler, the greatest of the Met's conductors, deftly cut his singers to size, and in only seven seasons changed the house from a kind of glorified star club into a smooth-functioning repertory theater. During one rehearsal, temperamental Soprano Farrar turned to him in a fury...