Word: verdis
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...stage of Milan's La Scala one evening last week, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, mused about the futility of wealth and power. The aria, Oh! de' verd'anni miei, got hearty applause. After the curtain fell on the third act of Verdi's Ernani, barrel-chested Baritone Cornell MacNeil scurried back to his dressing room, where he signed his name to a La Scala option for next season. Then he dispatched a cable to his wife in Cliffside Park, NJ.: "We tore up the pea patch, doll...
...scores he produced would remain his property after a performance. In an age without copyrights or royalties on performances, he funneled some of his earnings back to the composers. In 1839 he shrewdly bought the rights to the new opera Oberto from an unknown provincial composer named Verdi...
...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 was sometimes stormy. "All composers," Giulio wrote him once, "French, English, German, Turkish and Abyssinian, [are] a bunch of idiots...
...Ricordi's European copyrights on the works of Verdi will expire, to be followed before too long by the works of Puccini.*The firm may then become largely a record company (present U.S. distributors: RCA Victor, Mercury and Westminster). Artists-and-repertory chief of its burgeoning record division: Carlo Emanuele ("Nanni") Ricordi, 26, great-great-great grandson of Giovanni...
...European copyrights expire 50 years after the death of all of the authors, including the librettists. In the U.S., where all of the works of Verdi and some of Puccini's are now in the public domain, copyrights are protected only 56 years after each work's first publication...