Word: verdis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...obeyed so successfully that he became one of the four alltime opera masters, alongside Verdi, Wagner and Mozart. Though some critics dismiss him as sugary and sentimental, no opera house can hope to stay in business long without including in its repertory the three major monuments to Puccini's career-La Bohème, Tosca, Madame Butterfly. Puccini himself once made a list of the houses where his operas were playing; Tosca alone was then being given in 73 cities. His works steadily draw both dedicated opera buffs and occasional fans who might not recognize another note of opera...
Impresario Menotti could also count some other audience successes: a curtain-raising production of Verdi's early, daringly experimental Macbeth, given a sharply profiled, showily romantic reading by Conductor Schippers; a tensely moving performance of Eugene O'Neill's Moon for the Misbegotten; four "chamber ballets" by Choreographer John Butler. Still to come: Wisconsin-born Composer Lee Hoiby's opera The Witch, Florentine Composer Valentino Bucchi's Il Giuoco del Barone, the Daudet-Bizet L'Arlésienne...
...Vienna Staatsoper). But it has the daring to experiment with difficult new productions, e.g., its mounting last year of Berlioz' mammoth The Trojans, which no other opera house had attempted in a single evening since Berlioz' death. Glowed the London Observer over a birthday-season offering of Verdi's Don Carlos: "Go to La Scala by all means, but do not expect anything better than this...
Warren appeared with the Bolshoi Theater Company in the title role of Verdi's Rigoletto, a part that he has made his own at the Met. Several of the Russian singers (who sang in Russian while Warren sang in Italian) came close to matching Warren in acting ability, but when he opened up his big voice, he dominated the stage. After his Act II aria, Cortigiani "oil razza, reported the New York Times's Howard Taubman, the Russians stopped the show with a spontaneous outburst. At the final curtain, they gave him a standing ovation. Warren is scheduled...
Calling the Tune.. Author Sheean is fascinated by Verdi's "peasant" response both to the grim tragedies of his youth and the fame of his later years. The words that appear in Verdi's last and perhaps greatest work, Falstaff-"Cammina! Cammina!" (keep going, keep going)-were already his maxim in his null and he kept going at the rate of more than an opera a year. Verdi hated Milan, hated the power of La Scala's management, hated "the rule of the foreigner and the secret police." But to "keep going." he pruned...