Word: vissi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...having to sit through hours of music they don't really enjoy. Some come as cultists: just as bullfight aficionados find macabre joy in waiting for the matador to be gored, operagoers can wait in horrible human fascination for the soprano to go flat at the end of Vissi d'arte or to fall downstairs in the mad scene of Lucia. In its own way, by the nearly impossible demands it makes on singers, opera, like the corrida, pits man against nature...
...soprano last week was a thin and often wobbly echo of the voice that fled the Met in 1958. Her high notes were shrill and achingly insecure, and seemed all the more so by contrast with the rich, ringing tenor of Franco Corelli as Mario. In the poignant Vissi d'Arte aria, Callas relied almost wholly on dramatic rather than vocal brilliance to carry her through-which, in her case, is admittedly a compelling compromise. The audience certainly thought so. At the curtain, a shower of roses and confetti rained down from the galleries, and the house bravoed...