Word: verdis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Austrians who ruled northern Italy in the mid-19th century, the word Verdi was a nightmare. It haunted them from the very walls in huge letters, like the V sign of World War II. The great risorgimento that threw out the alien rulers and made the Italians a nation used Verdi as its symbolic pun-a tribute to Italy's greatest composer and a proud abbreviation for the name and title of its King, "Vittorio Emanuele, Re è d'Italia...
Nobody can explain just how the operas of Giuseppe Verdi became an "electrical communication with the spirit of the time." The idea "just grew"-to the point where Italian patriots detected in the most innocent little note or inflection of a Verdi aria a cry for liberty and revolt. When Cavour received one night the telegram that began Italy's second War of Independence, he said not a word to his aides. He merely flung the window open and bellowed a phrase of Verdi's // Trovatore to his sleeping countrymen...
Wounds & Distress. Vincent Sheean calls his book Orpheus at Eighty because it recounts Verdi's long life in a series of flashbacks showing the old composer looking back on the struggles and triumphs of his stupendous career. It is Sheean's best book since Personal History (1935), and if its prose could be rid of repetitions and the parentheses that break out half a dozen to the page, it would be the best introduction to Verdi and his music in the English language. Clearly a labor of love, it is at once a fine tribute and a history...
...Verdi was born of peasant stock near the town of Busseto in the Po Valley in 1813. When he was 18, the townsfolk sent him to Milan Conservatory, hoping that he could be trained to become Bus-seto's organist and orchestra director. But the conservatory examiners flunked Verdi; his talent for composition, they said, was "passable," but his pianoforte technique was ruined by "a faulty position of the hands and wrists." This "blow to all his pride and hope was so terrible" that Verdi never forgot, never forgave it. Helped by a friendly patron, he buckled down...
...Stuttgart Staatsoper. In her seven years in Europe. Grace has appeared at La Scala, Covent Garden. Florence. Bayreuth. With her 2½-octave range she has sung 20-odd roles, including Carmen. Gluck's Orpheus, Dora-bella in Mozart's Cosí fan Tutte, Ulrica in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, plus mezzo and contralto parts in the Ring cycle...