Word: traviatas
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...contributed to the history of music. I have taken music that has long been dead and buried and have brought it back to life again. If the time comes when my dear friend Renata Tebaldi will sing, among others, Norma or Lucia or Anna Bolena one night, then La Traviata or Gioconda or Medea the next-then, and only then, will we be rivals. Otherwise it is like comparing champagne with cognac. No-champagne with Coca-Cola...
Arias for Dolls. A solemn, solitary child, Renata started playing the piano when she was eight. Grandfather occasionally took her over to the opera house in Parma, and Renata took to putting her dolls to bed at night while singing Parigi, O cara from La Traviata. By ten, her voice was so penetrating that the merchants downstairs complained...
Then, without mentioning his name. Bernstein singed the war bonnet of New York Herald Tribune Critic Paul Henry Lang, 56, professor of musicology at Columbia University, who had scolded Maria Meneghini Callas and Tenor Daniele Barioni for singing flat in their first-act duet in La Traviata (TIME, Feb. 17). The pitch was dropping so fast at one point, Critic Lang had written, that it seemed as if the singers were about to land in the conductor's lap. Bernstein's complaint about this display of "great authority and chilling wit": Barioni was indeed...
...character of Violetta with ardency, hectic gaiety and a dampened passion that flickered through the role like a wayward fever. Her deathbed agonies had the quiet poignancy and the ring of truth that so often evade lesser artists. All in all, Callas gave the Met its most exciting Traviata in years, and demonstrated again that she has lost none of the turbulent appeal that can magnetize an audience at the flick of an arm or a twist of the head. Diva Callas' next Met roles: Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Puccini's Tosca...
Young Dumas' famed novel, The Lady of the Camellias (made into a play by Dumas himself and into a grand opera-La Traviata-by Verdi) was based on his love for Courtesan Marie Duplessis. She supplied him with "intoxicating orgies of the flesh"-and he, in return, struggled to reform her, adored her most when she "played the part of the repentant Magdalene." Marie died of consumption at 23, and young Dumas never forgot her glamorous, terrible life. He became "The Man in Flight from Temptation," began to write plays in which seducers were condemned with such cold precision...