Word: victor
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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During a span of 30 years, from 1894 to 1924, more than 40 of the musical comedies produced on Broadway bore the name of Victor Herbert. Fashions changed from broughams and leg-of-mutton sleeves to Stanley Steamers and hobble skirts, but the Herbert tunes endured. Radio took them up, made him the composer most played on the air. Last week his estate again proved itself to be a gold mine of melody. In Manhattan his daughter Ella Herbert Bartlett let it be known that she had sold Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the cinema rights to three of his operettas...
From the time Victor Herbert turned to operettas there seemed no limit to the inspiration which prompted one melody after another. The disappointment of his life was his failure to make a lasting name as a serious composer. He wrote concertos, cantatas, symphonic suites, all long forgotten. He wrote two operas: His Natoma was produced in 1911 by the Chicago Opera Company with Mary Garden and John McCormack, survived 38 performances; Madeleine (1914) lasted only four at Manhattan's Metropolitan...
...cellist playing obscurely in the Metropolitan pit, Victor Herbert began his U. S. career. He had left Ireland in his youth, studied in Germany, taken a job with the Stuttgart Opera when in 1886 Walter Damrosch visited there, offered a Metropolitan contract to Therese Forster, a comely young singer who was to become Mrs. Victor Herbert. Damrosch offered Herbert $60 per week for the sake of signing up the singer he wanted. Mrs. Herbert's heyday was brief. She retired to bear children, grew plumper & plumper, never quite mastered the English language...
...Conductor Arturo Toscanini, who dislikes mechanical music, has been steadfast in his refusal to make phonograph records. To him, his own performances always seemed short of perfection, hence unworthy of being perpetuated. During his last few months with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony (TIME, May 11 et ante), RCA Victor doubled its efforts to persuade him to change his mind, pleaded that he owed it to the public and posterity. The Maestro's "no" was unyielding until a friend suggested that he would be doing a real service to the composer he might interpret, that his records would help...
...FOOTNOTE*Victor...