Word: vissi
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With an Esoteric Records release, The Duse of Song (2 sides LP), out this month, younger opera lovers can hear the voice their elders have been talking about. Even though Esoteric has re-recorded its nine arias (including the Vissi d'Arte from Tosca) from 32-year-old cylinders, and Claudia Muzio's luscious voice is heard through a fog of needle scratch, her tones are full, even and velvety from top to bottom...
Puccini: Tosco (Love Duet, Act I) (Ljuba Welitch, soprano; Richard Tucker, tenor; the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Max Rudolf conducting; Columbia, 1 side LP). Some of Puccini's most heart-pulling music, beautifully sung. Although her voice is thinner, the Met's flaming new Tosca, in Vissi d'Arte, which completes the side, stands up mighty well with her Golden-Age counterpart, Claudia Muzio...
...second act, when Scarpia (Baritone Alexander Sved) threw her to the floor, he really threw her; Jeritza had insisted on realism. Once on the floor, she sang the famous aria "Vissi d'arte" lying prone as usual.* When Scarpia lifted her to her feet, she pushed him away so hard that the sofa he fell into almost went over backward. In the third act, weeping over the dead Cavaradossi, she managed real tears...
...Jeritza hit the Metropolitan Opera like a tidal wave. She sang the Vissi d'arte aria from Tosca lying flat on her face, the Seguidilla from Carmen flat on her back. In The Girl of the Golden West she rode a bronco on stage, and as Thai's she once celebrated her conversion to Christianity with a record high-jump that landed her in the hospital. All this musical whoopla endeared Jeritza to her public, if not to her fellow artists. Snorted Soprano Lilli Lehmann: "If you're a real artist you don't have...
...over the horse that ate Hagen's beard years ago in Gotterdammerung, the slap Geraldine Farrar gave Caruso in Carmen, the hot potato he mischievously pressed into Nordica's hand. Playing Tosca in Vienna before the War, Jeritza fell on her face, coolly sang the tender aria Vissi d'arte prone. Margaret Anglin once stalked out onto the Carnegie Hall stage to declaim Electra's grief, was appalled to find a cat peering out of her flowing Greek gown. Once when Mischa Levitzki was performing in Carnegie Hall, a mouse crept close to the piano...