Word: verdis
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...Usually, when an opera company puts on Aïda, singers have to don blackface to play Aïda and her father Amonasro, King of the Ethiopians. Last week, for its first production of Verdi's masterpiece, Manhattan's City Opera Company didn't have to bother: there were two first-rate Negro singers in the company...
...days later, plump, curly-haired Dorothy, 26-a soprano hardly anyone in London had ever heard of-found herself in the studio of His Majesty's Voice recording company. The famed star of the Milan Opera, Madame Margherita Grandi, was making a recording of the sleepwalking scene from Verdi's Macbeth. Suddenly, right at the end, Madame Grandi shut her mouth, and Dorothy took over. She sang three notes-F, A flat, and top D flat. For her pains, she got a slight bow from Madame Grandi and 5 guineas ($21.15). Then she went home...
...more than a personal triumph: he had also satisfied a debt of honor that had nagged him for 30 years. As a young man he had conducted Boito's pompously romantic opera, Mefistofele. Their friendship had ripened while Boito was busy winning greater fame as the librettist of Verdi's Otello and Falstaff-and plugging away for years at another opera of his own, Nerone...
...from Paris he traveled through Poland and Germany and picked up some heretical ideas that soon got him in hot water at home. Sample: he wrote a poem calling for a composer who could restore the glory of Italian music, "that altar, soiled like the wall of a brothel." Verdi, the most popular composer of the day, snapped: "If I am among those who, as Boito says, have sullied the altar, let him clean it, and I shall be the first to ... light a candle in his honor...
...even Verdi finally fell before the power of Boito's poetry and his superb dramatic skill. Said Verdi, after completing Otello at 73: "If I were 30 years younger, I should like to begin a new opera tomorrow-on the condition that Boito provided the libretto." Boito did, and the result (with Shakespeare's help) was Falstaff, one of the greatest triumphs of both words & music of them...