Word: violanta
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...contains one scene of cinema's first original grand opera-a balcony scene from a work called Romeo & Juliet of which only a few skeleton scenes were ever written. All the music except a short interpolation from Il Trovatore was composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose Violanta and Dead City have been given at the Metropolitan and who arranged the Mendelssohn score for Warner Brothers' Midsummer Night's Dream...
Tosca, Lohengrin, Cavelleria, Walkure followed the first season. Rosenkavalier, Thaïs, Tannhaüser, Fedora, Jenufa, Jewels of the Madonna, Turandot, Violanta, Carmen have been added since. Tosca and its like have brought her most fame. All the world knows now that she sings the Vissi d'arte lying flat on the stage, that she rolls down the church steps in Cavalleria, dies in most horrible agony in Carmen and Fedora, has a dozen devices for making opera exciting. Artistically she has done better with Walküre, Rosenkavalier, Lohengrin, Tannhaüser. Few having seen will forget...
...Novelty came from Vienna, special import for Maria Jeritza. Erich Korngold, so it seemed, wrote it at the precocious age of 16; called it Violanta after his heroine, a lovely enough Venetian lady who hated and lusted and loved and died in such swift turn as to gray the hair of any onlooker. Jeritza played it for all there was there, took every phrase, every mood, tight between her teeth, shook them hard, tried to make them answer back, got small return...
...broomstick way into the sky and ate little children. There was a gingerbread house and a red-hot oven where plop ended the witch pushed by wee Gretel just too stupid to get in herself. "Hocus pocus. . . ." Children loved it. So did grown-ups who quite forgot the tawdry Violanta of early afternoon...
...comely, pleasing. Richard Mayr (Vienna Staatsoper) was a dignified, experienced Pogner whose voice had seen better days. Dorothee Manski (Berlin Staatsoper) was the witch in Hansel und Gretel, a blathering old woman with small time to sing. Philine Falco in La Forza del Destino, Mildred Parisette in Violanta and Hansel, Margaret Bergen in the Sunday night concert, had small opportunities...