Word: verdis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Giuseppe Verdi called the opera his "best beloved child," but audiences have consistently agreed with George Bernard Shaw, who sneered that Verdi tried to turn Shakespeare's tragedy into another Trovatore. Last week, when Manhattan's Metropolitan staged Macbeth for the first time in its 76-year history, the opera kept moving from the sublime toward the ridiculous. The score contains much hauntingly beautiful music,* prefiguring the emotional insights of Otello, but it is also marred by trivia, such as a kind of witches' cancan in the first scene. The libretto (by Verdi, put into verse...
...have been sung by Maria Callas before Rudolf Bing fired her (TIME, Nov. 17), went to radiant Viennese Soprano Leonie Rysanek, who in her Met debut showed off an unusually pure and beautifully rounded voice and considerable acting talent. Her only fault was that she scarcely fitted Verdi's bill ("I would have Lady Macbeth ugly and wicked ... her voice should be that of a devil"). For the most part, Soprano Rysanek seemed more like an ambitious Org Man's tender helpmate than a driven woman goading her weak husband to murder. But in the sleepwalking scene...
...Verdi: Simon Boccanegra (Victoria de los Angeles, Tito Gobbi. Giuseppe Cam-pora, Boris Christoff; Rome Opera House Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Gabriele Santini; Capitol-EMI, 3 LPs). Verdi constructed his stately, somber-hued monument to paternal love and loyalty midway in his career, saw it fail at the box office and later agreed with the public that it was a "monotonous and cold'' work. Nevertheless, he returned to it after 25 years and extensively revised it. Not often performed, the revised Boccanegra is a fascinating melange of early Verdian flamboyance and late Verdian depth. In this...
Birgit Nilsson: Opera Arias (Angel). In her first American release, rising Swedish Soprano Nilsson sings selections from Wagner and Verdi in a big, flashing, vibrant voice long on power and drive, sometimes short on dramatic intensity...
...funeral. The choral parts suggest passion rather than piety; the orchestra skips and trips along with a fine comic invention. The work is at its most exuberant in the solo parts, which are as warmly melodic as the love songs of Italian street singers. Many an Italian requiem, including Verdi's, is shot through with operatic overtones, but Cimarosa's work verges on opera so closely that it requires only the substitution of a bedroom plot to move intact to the stage. Not a major work, it was nevertheless a musical find that richly deserved a hearing...