Mefistofele is an opera in a prologue, four acts and an epilogue, the only completed opera by the Italian composer-librettist Arrigo Boito.

Composition history

Boito began consideration of an opera on the Faustian theme after completing his studies at the Milan Conservatory in 1861. Mefistofele is one of many pieces of classical music based on the Faust legend, and like many other composers, Boito used Goethe's version as his starting point. He was an admirer of Richard Wagner, and like him chose to write his own libretto, something which was virtually unheard of in Italian opera up to that time.

The most popular earlier work based on the legend was Gounod's opera Faust, which Boito regarded as a superficial and frivolous treatment of a profound subject. Furthermore, Boito was contemptuous of what he saw as the low operatic standards prevailing in Italy at that time, and he determined to make his new work distinctive, both musically and intellectually, from anything that had been heard before. He hoped that it would be a wake-up call and an inspiration to other young Italian composers.

The piano-vocal score was completed in 1867 while Boito was staying in Poland where he was visiting relatives.

Performance history and revisions

Mefistofele premiered on 5 March 1868 at La Scala, Milan under the baton of the composer himself, despite his lack of experience and skill as a conductor. As the evening progressed the hostility of the audience, unfamiliar with Boito’s avant-garde musical style and unimpressed by many of the scenes (notably the scene in the emperor's court), steadily increased. Furthermore the work was far too long and the cast inadequate for the complexities of the music. When the curtain finally came down well after midnight it was clear that the premiere had been nothing short of a fiasco. After just two performances (the second one was split over two nights), the opera was withdrawn.

Boito immediately set to work revising his opera, greatly reduced its length and making many scenes smaller in scale. For instance, he removed the entire original act 4 and rewrote act 5 as an epilogue, adding the duet Lontano, lontano in the process. Faust was changed from a baritone to a tenor.

The revised version was premiered in Bologna on 4 October 1875, this time sung by what is generally regarded to be a very fine cast, and was an immediate success. This change in reception is thought to be partly due to Boito's revisions making the opera more traditional in style, and also to the Italian audience having become familiar with, and more willing to accept, developments in opera associated with Wagner.

Boito made further minor revisions during 1876, and this version was first performed in Venice on 13 May 1876. The first British performance took place at Her Majesty's Theatre, London on 6 July 1880 and the American premiere was on 16 November 1880 in Boston. In contrast, the Royal Opera House in London has only given one performance of the opera, a concert version in March 1998 at the Barbican Centre, with Samuel Ramey as the title character. As Mefistofele, the American bass made the role a signature one, appearing in many productions in the 1980s and early 1990s, including one given by the San Francisco Opera in November 1994

Roles

Synopsis

Prologue

A heavenly chorus praises God the Creator. Mefistofele scornfully declares that he can win the soul of Faust. His challenge is accepted by the Forces of Good.

Act 1

Scene 1

The aged Dr. Faust and his pupil Wagner are watching the Easter celebrations in the main square in Frankfurt. Faust senses that they are being followed by a mysterious friar, about whom he senses something evil. Wagner dismisses his master’s feelings of unease and as darkness falls they return to Faust’s home

Scene 2

Faust is in his study, deep in contemplation. His thoughts are disturbed in dramatic fashion by the sudden appearance of the sinister friar, whom he now recognizes as a manifestation of the Devil (Mefistofele). Far from being terrified, Faust is intrigued and enters into a discussion with Mefistofele culminating in an agreement by which he will give his soul to the devil on his death in return for worldly bliss for the remainder of his life.

Act 2

Scene 1

Restored to his youth, Faust has infatuated Margareta, an unsophisticated village girl. She is unable to resist his seductive charms and agrees to drug her mother with a sleeping draught and meet him for a night of passion. Meanwhile Mefistofele amuses himself with Martha, another of the village girls.

Scene 2

Mefistofele has carried Faust away to witness a Witches' Sabbath on the Brocken mountain. The devil mounts his throne and proclaims his contempt for the World and all its worthless inhabitants. As the orgy reaches its climax Faust sees a vision of Margareta, apparently in chains and with her throat cut. Mefistofele reassures him that the vision was a false illusion.

Act 3

Faust’s vision had been true. Margareta lies in a dismal cell, her mind in a state of confusion and despair. She has been imprisoned for poisoning her mother with the sleeping draught supplied by Faust and for drowning the baby she had borne him. Faust begs Mefistofele to help them escape together. They enter the cell and at first Margareta does not recognize her rescuers. Her joy at being reunited with Faust turns to horror when she sees Mefistofele and recognizes that he is the Devil. Refusing to succumb to further evil, Margareta begs for divine forgiveness. She collapses to the cell floor as the Celestial choir proclaims her redemption.

Act 4

Mefistofele has now transported Faust back in time to Ancient Greece. Helen of Troy and her followers are enjoying the luxurious and exotic surroundings on the banks of a magnificent river. Faust, attired more splendidly than ever, is easily able to win the heart of the beautiful princess. In a passionate outpouring they declare their undying love and devotion to each other.

Epilogue

Back in his study Faust, once more an old man, reflects that neither in the world of reality or of illusion was he able to find the perfect experience he craved. He feels that the end of his life is close, but desperate for his final victory, Mefistofele urges him to embark on more exotic adventures. For a moment Faust hesitates, but suddenly seizing his Bible he cries out for God’s forgiveness. Mefistofele has been thwarted; he disappears back into the ground as Faust dies and the Celestial choir once more sings of ultimate redemption.

Recordings

In popular culture

Batman Begins depicts the opera being performed onstage, using an excerpt of Rampiamo, rampiamo, che il tempo ci gabba (Chorus of Warlocks and Witches from Act 2, scene 2) from the 1973 EMI (see "Recordings" above). During the scene, performers dressed as bat-like monsters frighten young Bruce Wayne, who asks to leave.

An avant-gard video directed by Yevhen Tymokhin on a remix with the verse E' mia madre addormentata from Margareta's aria in Act 3 was awarded the Euro Video Grand Prix 2006.

Notes

References

Harewood, Earl of and Antony Peattie (Eds.), The New Kobbe's Opera Book, London: Ebury Press, 1997. ISBN 0-09-181410-3

Holden, Amanda (Ed.), The New Penguin Opera Guide, New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001. ISBN 0-140-29312-4

Sadie, Stanley (Ed.), The New Grove Book of Operas, London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 1996. ISBN 0-333-65107-3

External links

Libretto

Score at the International Music Score Library Project

Category:Operas by Arrigo Boito Category:Italian-language operas Category:1868 operas Category:1875 operas Category:Operas Category:Works based on the Faust legend

Arrigo Boito (24 February 184210 June 1918), aka Enrico Giuseppe Giovanni Boito, pseudonym Tobia Gorrio, was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist and composer, best known today for his libretti, especially those for Giuseppe Verdi's operas Otello and Falstaff, and his own opera Mefistofele.

Biography

Born in Padua, the son of Silvestro Boito, an Italian painter of miniatures and his wife, a Polish countess, Józefina Radolińska, Boito studied music at the Milan Conservatory with Alberto Mazzucato until 1861. In 1866 he fought under Giuseppe Garibaldi in the Seven Weeks War in which the Kingdom of Italy and Prussia fought against Austria, after which Venice was ceded to Italy.

His only finished opera, Mefistofele, based on Goethe's Faust, was given its first performance on 5 March 1868, at La Scala, Milan. The premiere, which he conducted himself, was badly received, provoking riots and duels over its supposed "Wagnerism", and it was closed by the police after two performances. Verdi commented, "He aspires to originality but succeeds only at being strange." Boito withdrew the opera from further performances to rework it, and it had a more successful second premiere, in Bologna on 10 April 1875. Boito's revised and drastically cut version also changed Faust from a baritone to a tenor, and it is still frequently performed and recorded today.

Other than Mefistofele, Boito wrote very little music. He completed (but later destroyed) another opera, Ero e Leandro, and left incomplete a further opera, Nerone, which he had been working at, on and off, between 1877 and 1915; excluding its last act, for which Boito left only a few sketches, Nerone was finished after his death by Arturo Toscanini and Vincenzo Tommasini and premiered at La Scala, 1924. Mefistofele is the only work of his performed with any regularity today. The Prologue to the opera, set in Heaven, is a favorite concert piece. He also left a Symphony in A minor in manuscript.

Boito's literary powers never dried up. As well as writing the libretti for his own operas, he wrote them for other composers. As "Tobia Gorrio" (an anagram of his name) he provided the libretto for Amilcare Ponchielli's La Gioconda. His rapprochement with Verdi, whom he had offended in a toast shortly after they had collaborated on Verdi's Inno delle Nazioni ("Anthem of the Nations", London, 1862), was effected by the music publisher Giulio Ricordi. Boito successfully revised the libretto for Verdi's unwieldy Simon Boccanegra, which then premiered to great acclaim in 1881. With that, their mutual friendship and respect blossomed and, though Verdi's projection for an opera based on King Lear never came to anything, Boito provided subtle and resonant libretti for Verdi's last masterpieces, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). When Verdi died, Boito was there at his bedside.

Boito succeeded Giovanni Bottesini as director of the Parma Conservatory after the latter's death in 1889 and held the post until 1897. He received the honorary degree of doctor of music from the University of Cambridge in 1893. He died in Milan and was interred there in the Cimitero Monumentale.

A memorial concert was given in his honor at La Scala in 1948. The orchestra was conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Recorded in very primitive sound, the concert has been issued on CD.

Camillo Boito, Arrigo's older brother, was an Italian architect and engineer, and a noted art critic, art historian and novelist.

Opera libretti

The years given are those of the premieres. :*Amleto (Franco Faccio; 1865) :*Un tramonto (Gaetano Coronaro; 1873) :*La falce (Alfredo Catalani; 1875) :*La Gioconda (Amilcare Ponchielli; 1876) :*Semira (L. San Germano; never perf.) :*Ero e Leandro (Giovanni Bottesini; 1879 - Luigi Mancinelli; 1897) :*Simon Boccanegra (Giuseppe Verdi; 1881 [revised version]) :*Basi e bote (Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli; 1927) :*Otello (Verdi; 1887) :*Falstaff (Verdi; 1893)

Boito also provided the text to Verdi's cantata Inno delle Nazioni (24 May 1862, Her Majesty's Theatre, London).

Recordings

Mefistofele

Serafin/Tebaldi/del Monaco/Siepi (1958), Decca

Patanè/Marton/Domingo/Ramey (1989), Sony

Muti/Crider/La Scola/Ramey (1996), RCA

Nerone

Capuana/di Cavalieri/Lazzarini/Picchi/Guelfi-G/Petri (1957; live in Naples), Cetra

Gavazzeni/Ligabue/Baldani/Prevedi/Cassis/Ferrin (1975; live in Turin), Living Stage

Queler/Tokody/Takács/Nagy/Miller/Dene (1981), Hungaroton

Queler/Andrade/Takács/Cigoj/Elvira/Morris (1982; live in New York), broadcast

Bareza/Janeva Iveljic/Nikolova/Cigoj/McShane/Petrusanec (1989; video in Split), House of Opera

Depictions in media

The play After Aida — a 1985 play-with-music by Julian Mitchell — depicts the struggle of Giulio Ricordi and Franco Faccio to get the retired Verdi to collaborate with young Boito on a project, which resulted in Otello.

See also

Scapigliatura

References

Arrigo Boito at the Stanford University: OperaGlass Composer index

Mefistofele Creative Commons MP3 Recording

Costantino Maeder, Il real fu dolore e l'ideal sogno. Arrigo Boito e i limiti dell'arte, Cesati: Firenze, 2002.

Emanuele d'Angelo, Arrigo Boito, in Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, edited by Gaetana Marrone, New York, Routledge, 2007, 1, pp. 271–274.

Riccardo Viagrande, Arrigo Boito "Un caduto chèrubo", poeta e musicista, Palermo, L'Epos, 2008.

Emanuele d'Angelo, Arrigo Boito drammaturgo per musica. Idee, visioni, forma e battaglie, Venezia, Marsilio, 2010.

Category:1842 births Category:1918 deaths Category:People from Padua Category:Italian composers Category:Opera composers Category:Opera librettists Category:Romantic composers Category:19th-century Italian people Category:Milan Conservatory alumni Category:Giuseppe Verdi

Samuel Edward Ramey (born March 28, 1942 in Colby, Kansas) is an American operatic bass with a long, distinguished career. During his best years, he was greatly admired for his range and versatility, having possessed a sufficiently accomplished bel canto technique to enable him to sing the music of Handel, Mozart, Rossini, yet power enough to handle the more overtly dramatic roles written by Verdi and Puccini.

He married his third wife, soprano Lindsey Larsen, on June 29, 2002.

Early life

Samuel Ramey is a 1960 graduate of Colby High School in the town of Colby, Kansas. He studied music in high school and in college at Kansas State University, as well as at Wichita State with Arthur Newman. In college at Kansas State, Ramey was a member of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. After further study in Central City (where he was in the chorus of Don Giovanni in 1963, with Norman Treigle in the title role) and as an apprentice with the Santa Fe Opera, he went to New York where he worked for an academic publisher before he had his first breakthrough at the New York City Opera, debuting on March 11, 1973 singing the role of Zuniga in the 1875 Bizet opera Carmen, after which, among other roles, he took over the Faustian devils in Gounod's Faust and Boito's Mefistofele left empty by the early death of Treigle.

As his repertoire expanded, he spent more and more time in the theatres of Europe, notably in Berlin, Hamburg, London, Paris, Vienna, and the summer festivals in Aix-en-Provence, Glyndebourne, Pesaro, and Salzburg.

Later career

In January 1984, Ramey made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Handel's Rinaldo. He has since become a fixture at the Teatro alla Scala, Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera, the Paris Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the New York City Opera, and the San Francisco Opera.

In the bel canto repertoire, Ramey has excelled in Mozart's Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro and in Rossini's Semiramide, The Barber of Seville, Il Turco in Italia, L'italiana in Algeri; in Donizetti's Anna Bolena and Lucia di Lammermoor and Bellini's I puritani.

In the dramatic repertoire, Ramey has been acclaimed for his "Three Devils": Boito's Mefistofele, Gounod's Faust, and Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust

Other dramatic roles have included Verdi's Nabucco, Don Carlo, I Lombardi and Jérusalem and Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (portraying all four villains). A number of previously obscure operas with strong bass/bass-baritone roles have been revived solely for Ramey, such as Verdi's Attila, Rossini's Maometto II and Massenet's Don Quichotte.

Recordings

Ramey has made an exceptionally large number of recordings that feature nearly all of his main operatic roles as well as collections of miscellaneous arias, other classical pieces and crossover discs of popular American music. He has also appeared on television and video productions of the Met's productions of Carmen and Bluebeard's Castle, San Francisco's production of Mefistofele, Glyndebourne's production of The Rake's Progress and Salzburg's production of Don Giovanni.

In 1996, Ramey gave a concert at New York's Avery Fisher Hall titled "A Date with the Devil" in which he sang 14 arias representing the core of this repertoire, and he continues to tour this program throughout the world. In 2000, Ramey presented this concert at Munich's Gasteig Concert Hall. This performance was recorded live and was released on compact disc in the northern summer of 2002. In recent years, however, his singing has been criticized for a wobble, the result of years of heavy use.

Current activities

Ramey lives in Chicago and has participated in some 70 performances a year. He serves as a member of the faculty at Roosevelt University's Chicago College of Performing Arts. He is a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.

Notes

References

Samuel Ramey's website, samuelramey.com Retrieved 25 January 2010

Article on Samuel Ramey with Bach cantata recordings, on bach-cantatas.com Retrieved 25 July 2010

New York Times">List of "Articles on Samuel Ramey", New York Times Retrieved 25 July 2010

Bibliography

Samuel Ramey: American Bass, by Jane Scovell, Baskerville Publishers, 2010. ISBN 978-1-880909-76-8

External links

Samuel Ramey's website

MySpace: a tribute to Samuel Ramey

Category:1942 births Category:Living people Category:People from Thomas County, Kansas Category:Kansas State University alumni Category:Wichita State University alumni Category:American male singers Category:American opera singers Category:Operatic bass-baritones Category:Operatic basses Category:Grammy Award winners

Magda Olivero (born March 25, 1910) is a soprano of the verismo-school of singing. She was born in Saluzzo, Italy. Olivero made her operatic debut in 1932 on Turin radio in Cattozzo’s oratorio I misteri dolorosi. She performed widely and increasingly successfully until 1941, when she married and retired from performing. She returned to the stage ten years later, at the request of Francesco Cilèa, who asked her to sing the title role in his opera Adriana Lecouvreur.

From 1951 until her final retirement, Olivero sang in opera houses around the world. Among her most renowned interpretations were the leading parts in Adriana Lecouvreur, Iris, Fedora, La bohème, La fanciulla del West, La traviata, La Wally, Madama Butterfly, Manon Lescaut, Mefistofele, and Turandot (as Liù.)

She sang in Cherubini's Medea in Dallas in 1967 and in Kansas City in 1968. In 1975, already an international star for four decades, she made her début at the Metropolitan Opera House in Tosca. Her last performances on stage were in March 1981 in the one-woman opera, La voix humaine by Poulenc. Thus, her stage career ended at age 71 and spanned nearly 50 years. She continued to sing church music locally and, well into her eighties, made a recording of several arias. Recordings exist of many of her great performances of both full operas and arias and scenes.

Among her studio recordings are Turandot (as Liù, with Gina Cigna, for Cetra, 1938), Fedora (with Mario del Monaco and Tito Gobbi, conducted by Lamberto Gardelli, for Decca, 1969) and highlights from Francesca da Rimini (with del Monaco, conducted by Nicola Rescigno, for Decca, 1969). In 1993, she recorded, with piano accompaniment, Adriana Lecouvreur (with Marta Moretto as the Princesse de Bouillon); excerpts from this recorded were published on the Bongiovanni label. At the age of 86, she still managed to perform Adriana's monologue in Jan Schmidt-Garre's film Opera Fanatic, and into her nineties was still making occasional singing appearances. Olivero celebrated her 100th birthday on March 25, 2010.

References

;Further sources

Hastings, Stephen, "Verismo Muse", Opera News, Vol. 70, No. 7, January 2006. (accessed via subscription 28 March 2010)

Quattrocchi, Vincenzo, Magda Olivero: Una voce per tre generazioni, Azzali, 1984

Stinchelli, Enrico, "L'art n'a pas d'âge: Magda Olivero", Les stars de l'opéra: Grands artistes lyriques de l'histoire de l'opéra, Gremese Editore, 2002, pp. 80–81. ISBN 8873014992

Further reading

Konrad Dryden. From Another World: The Art of Magda Olivero, The Opera Quarterly, vol. 20 number 3, Summer 2004

Konrad Dryden. Franco Alfano, Transcending Turandot (Scarecrow Press Inc., 2009) Foreword by Magda Olivero.

External links

Jean-Pierre Mouchon, ed. Hommage à Magda Olivero pour ses cent ans ("Étude" n°47, May-June-July-August 2010, 64 p., ill.Journal published by Association internationale de chant lyrique "Titta Ruffo", Marseilles, France, with contributions by Andrea Lanzola, Vincenzo Quattrocchi, Salvatore Aiello, Serenella Gragnani, Riccardo Ristori).

Magda Olivero in an excerpt from Tosca (1960).

Category:Italian opera singers Category:1910 births Category:Operatic sopranos Category:Living people Category:Italian female singers Category:Italian sopranos Category:People from Saluzzo Category:Italian centenarians

Virginia Zeani (born October 21, 1925) is a Romanian soprano, particularly associated with the Italian repertory, especially the role of Violetta in La traviata.

Zeani was born, Virginia Zahan, in Solovăstru, Romania. She studied first in Bucarest, with famed coloratura soprano Lydia Lipkowska, and in Milan, with the great tenor Aureliano Pertile. She made her professional debut in Bologna, as Violetta in La traviata, a role she would sing an estimated 648 times around the world during her career. Her partner that evening was tenor Arrigo Pola (Alfredo), the voice teacher of Luciano Pavarotti.

Her career was first primarily focused in Italy, where she sang at most opera houses, but soon her reputation led to invitations at major opera houses of Europe as well. Violetta was her debut role in London, Vienna, and Paris. She made her debut at La Scala in Milan in 1956, as Cleopatra in Handel 's Giulio Cesare, opposite Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, whom she married shortly after.

Zeani also appeared in Leningrad, Moscow, Philadelphia, and the New York's Metropolitan Opera, as Violetta, in 1966.

She won considerable success in belcanto roles, such as Lucia di Lammermoor, Gilda in Rigoletto, Elvira in I Puritani, Linda di Chamounix, before turning to more dramatic roles, such as Manon Lescaut, Tosca, Fedora, Adriana Lecouvreur.She also tackled a few Verdi and Wagner roles, such as Lina in Stiffelio, Elsa in Lohengrin. She created the role of Blanche in Dialogues des Carmélites in 1957, at La Scala.

She sang with tenors such as Beniamino Gigli, Ferruccio Tagliavini, Carlo Bergonzi, Alfredo Kraus, Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, etc. A warm-voiced singer with an affecting stage presence, she made few commercial recordings, but a number of her live performances exist as bootleg recordings.

Following her retirement from the opera stage in 1983, Zeani remained active as a voice instructor at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where she and her husband, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, were both honored as "Distinguished Professors".

After her husband's death in 1991 she taught at IU for many more years before moving to Florida. There she continues to teach, in particular for the Florida Grand Opera Young artist program and the Palm Beach Opera Young artist program. Amongst Zeani's most famous pupils are Marilyn Mims, Susan Patterson, Sylvia McNair, Stephen Mark Brown, Elizabeth Futral, Vivica Genaux, Angela Brown, Mark Nicolson, and Heidi Klassen.

Sources

Guide de l'opéra, Roland Mancini & Jean Rouvereoux, (Fayard, 1995). ISBN 2-213-01563-6

The Complete Dictionary of Opera and Operetta, James Anderson ISBN 0-517-09156-9

Opera News Magazine, January 2003.

Category:1925 births Category:Living people Category:Indiana University faculty Category:Romanian female singers Category:Romanian opera singers Category:Romanian sopranos Category:People from Mureş County

Norman Treigle (né Adanelle Wilfred Treigle born 6 March 1927 - died 16 February 1975) was an American operatic bass-baritone, who was acclaimed for his great abilities as a singing-actor and specialized in roles that evoked villainy and terror.

Biography

Treigle was born in New Orleans, the fifth and final child of a poor carpenter and his wife. Following his 1946 marriage to the former Loraine Siegel, the bass-baritone began vocal studies with the contralto Elisabeth Wood. In 1947, he made his operatic debut with the New Orleans Opera Association, as the Duke of Verona in Roméo et Juliette.

Between 1949 and 1951, he attended Loyola University of the South's College of Music, while performing various roles with the local opera company.

In 1953, Treigle made his New York City Opera debut, as Colline in La bohème. Three years later, the bass-baritone scored his first significant success, as the tormented Reverend Olin Blitch, in the New York premiere of Floyd's Susannah. He made his European debut in this same opera, at the Brussels World's Fair, in 1958.

In succeeding seasons, Treigle became one of the top bass-baritones in North America, and was acclaimed as one of the world's foremost singing-actors. He sang in many experimental productions and participated in several important premieres, in operas by Einem, Copland, Moore, Floyd, Orff, Dallapiccola and Ward (The Crucible). Perhaps his greatest roles were in Faust (as Méphistophélès), Carmen (as Escamillo), Susannah, Il prigioniero, Les contes d'Hoffmann (the four Villains), Boris Godunov and, especially, Mefistofele.

In the autumn of 1974, Treigle made his London debut at Covent Garden in a new production of Faust. On February 16, 1975, Treigle was found dead in his New Orleans apartment. He had been diagnosed as a chronic insomniac and it was determined that he had consumed an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. By his first wife, he had a son (who died in 1993) and a daughter, Phyllis. He had also adopted the daughter of his second wife, from whom he was separated at the time of his death.

Phyllis Treigle is a soprano who appeared with the New Orleans Opera and the New York City Opera.

Norman Treigle was posthumously named a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.

Selected Discography of Studio Recordings

Copland: The Tender Land: abridged (Clements, Cassilly, Fredricks; Copland, 1965) Columbia Records

Handel: Giulio Cesare (Sills, Forrester; Rudel, 1967) RCA

Floyd: Pilgrimage: excerpts (Torkanowsky, 1971) Orion

Offenbach: Les contes d'Hoffmann (Sills, Marsee, Burrows; Rudel, 1972) Westminster (Deutsche Grammophon)

Boito: Mefistofele (Caballé, Domingo; Rudel, 1973) EMI

Selected Approved "Live" Recordings

Puccini: La bohème (Albanese, Schuh, di Stefano, Valdengo; Cellini, 1959) VAI

Floyd: Susannah (Curtin, Cassilly; Andersson, 1962) VAI

Floyd: The Sojourner and Mollie Sinclair (Neway; Rudel, 1963) VAI

Floyd: Markheim (Schuh; Andersson, 1966) VAI

Handel: Giulio Cesare: excerpts (Sills; Richter, 1968) VAI

Commercial Videography

Floyd: Susannah: Revival Scene (Yestadt, Treigle, 1958) [live] Bel Canto Society

Bibliography

Strange Child of Chaos: Norman Treigle, by Brian Morgan, iUniverse, 2006. ISBN 0-595-38898-1

Trivia

A fragment of the Treigle voice is heard in the 2005 Warner Bros. film, Batman Begins, directed by Christopher Nolan. The young Bruce Wayne and his parents are seen attending a performance of Mefistofele in Gotham City, and the recording used is EMI's 1973 set.

External links

Norman Treigle in an excerpt from Susannah (1958).

Norman Treigle in excerpts from Mefistofele (1968, audio only).

Category:American opera singers Category:Musicians from New Orleans, Louisiana Category:Operatic bass-baritones Category:1927 births Category:1975 deaths Category:Loyola University New Orleans alumni

Éva Marton (born June 18, 1943, Budapest) is a Hungarian dramatic soprano, particularly known for her operatic portrayals of Puccini's Turandot and Tosca, and Wagnerian roles.

Vocal training and early years

Marton studied voice at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. She made her professional debut as Kate Pinkerton in Puccini's Madama Butterfly at Hungary's Margaret Island summer festival. At the Hungarian State Opera, she made her debut as Queen of Shemaka in Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or in 1968.

In 1972, she was invited by Christoph von Dohnányi to make her debut as the Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro at the Frankfurt Opera. That same year, she sang Matilde in Rossini's Guglielmo Tell in Florence, conducted by Riccardo Muti. She also returned to Budapest to sing Odabella in Verdi's Attila. In 1973, Marton made her debut at the Vienna State Opera in Puccini's Tosca. In 1977, she sang at the Hamburg State Opera, in the role of the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten, and made her San Francisco Opera debut in the title role of Verdi's Aida. In 1978, Marton made her debut at La Scala in Milan as Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore. She debuted at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1979 as Maddalena in Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chénier.

In 1981, she performed at the Munich Opera Festival in the title role of Die ägyptische Helena by Richard Strauss, Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting. She sang the role of Leonore in Beethoven's Fidelio in 1982 and 1983, both performances conducted by Lorin Maazel.

Marton later became a frequent interpreter of the role of Brünnhilde in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. She performed in the complete Zubin Mehta-led Ring cycle at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1996. In 1998, she appeared in a new production of Lohengrin at the Hamburg State Opera, portraying Ortrud. She retired from the operatic stage after performing the role of Klytemnestra in Elektra in Barcelona (Spain) in Feb/March 2008. However, she is scheduled to sing Klytämnestra in staged performance of Elektra in Grand Théâtre de Genève in November 2010.

References

Category:1943 births Category:Living people Category:Hungarian female singers Category:Hungarian opera singers Category:Operatic sopranos

Claudia Muzio (February 7, 1889 - May 24, 1936) was an Italian operatic soprano, whose international career was among the most successful of the early 20th century.

Early years

Born in Pavia, Claudia Muzio was the daughter of an operatic stage manager, whose engagements during her childhood took the family to opera houses around Italy as well as to Covent Garden in London and to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She arrived in London at the age of 2 and went to school there, becoming fluent in English, before returning to Italy at the age of 16 to study in Turin with Annetta Casaloni, a piano teacher and former operatic mezzo-soprano who had created the role of Maddalena in the world première of Verdi's Rigoletto. Muzio then continued her vocal studies in Milan with Elettra Callery-Viviani.

Career

Muzio made her operatic début in Arezzo (15 January 1910) in the title-role of Massenet's Manon, and despite her youth she made rapid progress in the opera-houses of Italy, leading to débuts at La Scala in Milan in 1913 (as Desdemona in Verdi's Otello), in Paris (as Desdemona) and in London at Covent Garden (as Puccini's Manon Lescaut) in 1914; she stayed on in London to sing other roles including Mimi and Tosca (both with Caruso). She was invited to the Met in New York in December 1916 (for Tosca) and was so successful that she continued to appear there during six successive years. It was at the Metropolitan that Muzio created the role of Giorgetta in Il tabarro, in the world première of Puccini's triple-bill, Il trittico, on 14 December 1918.

She established a special relationship with audiences at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, where she first appeared in June 1919 (in Catalani's Loreley). From then until 1934 she sang there in 23 different operas, becoming known as "la divina Claudia".

Between 1922 and 1932, she also appeared regularly in Chicago (after falling out with the management at the New York Met). On October 15, 1932 she performed the title role of Tosca to inaugurate the new War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. Other notable roles in her career included Aida, Santuzza in Cavalleria rusticana, Maddalena in Andrea Chénier, and Leonora in Il trovatore (all in New York), and also Violetta in La traviata and Leonora in La forza del destino (in Chicago and Buenos Aires). Her last and according to some critics her greatest role was in Rome in 1934 as Cecilia in the opera of that name written for her by Licinio Refice. Her most popular role, however, was Violetta, in which she was considered unsurpassed throughout the Latin opera world (Italy, Spain, South America).

Claudia Muzio was noted for the beauty and warmth of her voice, which, although not particularly large, acquired a considerable richness of tonal colouring as she grew older. Her performances were sometimes criticised for excessive use of dynamic extremes, including her exquisitely expressive pianissimo singing. She had an impressive stage presence, being tall, elegant and full-figured. Her acting always conveyed an intense identification with the characters she portrayed. She was a dedicated and hard-working performer who remained modest and even reclusive despite her increasing fame and wealth. She regularly partnered some of the leading tenors of the day - Caruso, Gigli, Martinelli - and many of her fellow singers expressed the highest regard for her ability (including Ebe Stignani, Eva Turner, and Alfred Piccaver).

Last years

In her later years, Muzio experienced some financial anxiety after losing money through the extravagance of a manager/rumoured lover and then in the Wall Street crash. She married in 1929 Renato Liberati, seventeen years her junior. In 1930 she started to experience some health problems, but continued singing and recording. On 24 May 1936, after a short illness, she died in a Rome hotel of what was officially described as heart failure, aged 47. There was much speculation about other possible causes of death, including suicide. The correspondent for The Times (London) commented: "Her death has been received here with the utmost consternation, as she was highly valued for her gifts both as a vocalist and as an actress."

She is buried in the Cimitero del Verano in Rome.

Recordings

Claudia Muzio is represented by recordings from various stages of her career, but unfortunately few of them are from the period of her greatest successes in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She also had the bad luck to record primarily for two companies whose distribution was limited and erratic: Pathé and Edison. Muzio's Pathé discs are of mixed quality due to Pathé's problematic recording process -- artists recorded to cylinder masters which were then pantographically transferred to disc masters for making stampers, and frequency range loss and distortion often occurred during the cylinder-to-disc processing. Her Edison recordings, however, represent not only some of the best operatic recordings released by that company, but also Muzio's power and ability to project her personal intensity through the difficult acoustic recording process. She was aided at Edison by chief recordist Walter Miller's exceptionally good engineering and accompaniments directed by Edison's gifted staff conductor Cesare Sodero.

1911. HMV. Muzio recorded 2 arias, including "Si, mi chiamano Mimì" from La Bohème, when she was only 22 and her voice and technique were still relatively immature. [Included on CD transfer Romophone 81005-2.]

1917-1918. Pathé. 43 titles recorded. [Transferred to CD on Romophone 81010-2.]

1920-1925. Edison. 37 titles recorded. [Transferred to CD by Pearl, GEMM CDS 9072, and also on Romophone 81005-2.]

1932. In October, Muzio appeared in the opening production of Tosca at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House; the opening night was recorded for radio, and Act I has been issued on CD (in very poor sound quality). [Available on Minerva MN-A76, as part of a collection of Muzio's Puccini performances.]

1934-1935. Columbia. Muzio personally produced and financed a set of 26 recordings for Columbia in 1934 and 1935. By 1935, there is some noticeable weakening of the top of her voice but her expressive powers are well-displayed, especially in a much-admired interpretation of "Addio del passato" from Verdi's La traviata. The sound-quality of these is fairly good, and they are the recordings by which she has been best remembered. [Transferred to CD on Romophone 81015; 19 titles, along with her 1911 La Bohème track, are also on Nimbus NI 7814.]

References

Douglas, Nigel. [1994]. "Claudia Muzio", in More legendary voices, pp.183-206. London, André Deutsch. .

Richards, J.B. [1968]. "Claudia Muzio". Record Collector, XVII (1968) nos.9-10, pp.197-237; no.11, p.256 (with discography by H. Barnes). [Not consulted.]

Steane, John. [1989]. "Claudia Muzio: a centenary tribute". Musical Times, v.130, no.1752 (Feb.1989), pp.72-73,75.

External links

Offers a downloadable version of Tatiana's letter scene from Eugene Onegin, sung in Italian under the title "Sei forse l'angelo fidele"; recorded by Edison in 1920. Muzio, Claudia at www.cantabile-subito.de Gives a brief biography with several pictures.

Category:1889 births Category:1936 deaths Category:Italian female singers Category:Italian opera singers Category:Italian sopranos Category:Operatic sopranos

Maria Callas () (December 2, 1923September 16, 1977) was an American-born Greek soprano and one of the most renowned opera singers of the 20th century. She combined an impressive bel canto technique, a wide-ranging voice, and great dramatic gifts. An extremely versatile singer, her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini; further, to the works of Verdi and Puccini; and, in her early career, to the music dramas of Wagner. Her remarkable musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed as La Divina.

Born in New York City and raised by an overbearing mother, she received her musical education in Greece and established her career in Italy. Forced to deal with the exigencies of wartime poverty and with myopia that left her nearly blind on stage, she endured struggles and scandal over the course of her career. She turned herself from a heavy woman into a svelte and glamorous one after a mid-career weight loss, which might have contributed to her vocal decline and the premature end of her career. The press exulted in publicizing Callas's allegedly temperamental behavior, her supposed rivalry with Renata Tebaldi, and her love affair with Aristotle Onassis. Her dramatic life and personal tragedy have often overshadowed Callas the artist in the popular press. However, her artistic achievements were such that Leonard Bernstein called her "The Bible of opera", and her influence so enduring that, in 2006, Opera News wrote of her: "Nearly thirty years after her death, she's still the definition of the diva as artist—and still one of classical music's best-selling vocalists."

Early life

Family life, childhood and move to Greece

According to her birth certificate, Maria Callas was born Sophia Cecelia Kalos at Flower Hospital (now the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center), at 1249 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, on December 2, 1923 to Greek parents George Kalogeropoulos and Evangelia "Litsa" (sometimes "Litza") Dimitriadou, though she was christened Anna Maria Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulou – the genitive of the patronymic Kalogeropoulos – (). Callas's father had shortened the surname Kalogeropoulos first to "Kalos" and subsequently to "Callas" in order to make it more manageable. The marriage continued to deteriorate and in 1937 Evangelia decided to return to Athens with her two daughters.

In 1957, she told Norman Ross, "Children should have a wonderful childhood. I have not had it – I wish I had." On the other hand, biographer Pestalis-Diomidis asserts that it was actually Evangelia's hateful treatment of George in front of their young children which led to resentment and dislike on Callas's part. However, when interviewed by Pierre Desgraupes on the French program L'Invitee Du Dimanche, Callas attributed the development of her chest voice not to Trivella, but to her next teacher, the well-known Spanish coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo.

Callas studied with Trivella for two years before her mother secured another audition at the Athens Conservatoire with de Hidalgo. Callas auditioned with "Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster." De Hidalgo recalled hearing "tempestuous, extravagant cascades of sounds, as yet uncontrolled but full of drama and emotion". Callas herself said that she would go to "the conservatoire at 10 in the morning and leave with the last pupil ... devouring music" for 10 hours a day. When asked by her teacher why she did this, her answer was that even "with the least talented pupil, he can teach you something that you, the most talented, might not be able to do."

Early operatic career in Greece

After several appearances as a student, Callas began appearing in secondary roles at the Greek National Opera. De Hidalgo was instrumental in securing roles for her, allowing Callas to earn a small salary, which would help her and her family get through the difficult war years.

Main operatic career

After returning to the United States and reuniting with her father in September 1945, Callas made the round of auditions. Subsequently he recommended Callas to retired tenor and impresario Giovanni Zenatello. During her audition, Zenatello became so excited that he jumped up and joined Callas in the Act 4 duet. She was engaged to sing the role of Brünnhilde in Die Walküre at the Teatro la Fenice, when Margherita Carosio, who was engaged to sing Elvira in I puritani in the same theater, fell ill. Unable to find a replacement for Carosio, Maestro Serafin told Callas that she would be singing Elvira in six days; when Callas protested that she not only did not know the role, but also had three more Brünnhildes to sing, he told her "I guarantee that you can." Franco Zeffirelli recalled, "What she did in Venice was really incredible. You need to be familiar with opera to realize the enormity of her achievement. It was as if someone asked Birgit Nilsson, who is famous for her great Wagnerian voice, to substitute overnight for Beverly Sills, who is one of the great coloratura sopranos of our time." and he directed her in lavish new productions of La vestale, La traviata, La sonnambula, Anna Bolena, and Iphigénie en Tauride. Callas was notably instrumental in arranging Franco Corelli's debut at La Scala in 1954, where he sang Licinio in Spontini's La vestale opposite Callas's Julia. The two had sung together for the first time the year previously in Rome in a production of Norma. Anthony Tommasini wrote that Corelli had "earned great respect from the fearsomely demanding Callas, who in Mr. Corelli finally had someone with whom she could act." The two collaborated several more times at La Scala, singing opposite each other in productions of Fedora (1956), Il pirata (1958) and Poliuto (1960). Their partnership continued throughout the rest of Callas's career.

Callas made her American debut in Chicago in 1954, and "with the Callas Norma, Lyric Opera of Chicago was born." Her Metropolitan Opera debut, opening the Met's seventy-second season on October 29, 1956 was again with Norma, but was preceded with an unflattering cover story in Time magazine which rehashed all of the Callas clichés, including her temper, her supposed rivalry with Renata Tebaldi, and especially her difficult relationship with her mother. She further solidified this company's standing when, in 1958, she gave "a towering performance as Violetta in La Traviata and that same year, in her only American performances of Medea, gave an interpretation of the title role worthy of Euripides."

In 1958 a feud with Rudolf Bing led to Callas's Metropolitan Opera contract being cancelled. Impresario Allen Oxenburg realised that this situation provided him with an opportunity to hire Callas for his own company, the American Opera Society, and he accordingly approached Callas with a contract to perform Imogene in Il pirata. She accepted and sang the role in a January 1959 performance that according to opera critic Allan Kozinn "quickly became legendary in operatic circles". Bing and Callas later reconciled their differences and she returned to the house in 1965 to sing the title role in two performances as Tosca opposite Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi for one performance (March 19, 1965) and Richard Tucker (March 25, 1965) with Tito Gobbi as Scarpia for her final performances at the Met.

In 1952, she made her London debut at the Royal Opera House in Norma with veteran mezzo soprano Ebe Stignani as Adalgisa, a performance which survives on record and also features the young Joan Sutherland in the small role of Clotilde. In 1968, Callas told Edward Downes that during her initial performances in Cherubini's Medea in May 1953, she realized that she needed a leaner face and figure to do dramatic justice to this as well as the other roles she was undertaking. She adds,

I was getting so heavy that even my vocalizing was getting heavy. I was tiring myself, I was perspiring too much, and I was really working too hard. And I wasn't really well, as in health; I couldn't move freely. And then I was tired of playing a game, for instance playing this beautiful young woman, and I was heavy and uncomfortable to move around. In any case, it was uncomfortable and I didn't like it. So I felt now if I'm going to do things right—I've studied all my life to put things right musically, so why don't I diet and put myself into a certain condition where I'm presentable. Various rumors spread regarding her weight loss method; one had her swallowing a tapeworm, while Rome's Pantanella Mills pasta company claimed she lost weight by eating their "physiologic pasta", prompting Callas to file a lawsuit. Walter Legge stated that Callas possessed that most essential ingredient for a great singer: an instantly recognizable voice. During "The Callas Debate", Italian critic Rodolfo Celletti stated, "The timbre of Callas's voice, considered purely as sound, was essentially ugly: it was a thin sound, which gave the impression of dryness, of aridity. It lacked those elements which, in a singer's jargon, are described as velvet and varnish... yet I really believe that part of her appeal was precisely due to this fact. Why? Because for all its natural lack of varnish, velvet and richness, this voice could acquire such distinctive colours and timbres as to be unforgettable." However, in his review of Callas's 1951 live recording of I vespri siciliani, Ira Siff writes, "Accepted wisdom tells us that Callas possessed, even early on, a flawed voice, unattractive by conventional standards — an instrument that signaled from the beginning vocal problems to come. Yet listen to her entrance in this performance and one encounters a rich, spinning sound, ravishing by any standard, capable of delicate dynamic nuance. High notes are free of wobble, chest tones unforced, and the middle register displays none of the "bottled" quality that became more and more pronounced as Callas matured."

Nicola Rossi-Lemeni relates that Callas's mentor Tullio Serafin used to refer to her as "Una grande vociaccia"; he continues, "Vociaccia is a little bit pejorative—it means an ugly voice—but grande means a big voice, a great voice. A great ugly voice, in a way." Callas herself did not like the sound of her own voice; in one of her last interviews, answering whether or not she was able to listen to her own voice, she replies,

Yes, but I don't like it. I have to do it, but I don't like it at all because I don't like the kind of voice I have. I really hate listening to myself! The first time I listened to a recording of my singing was when we were recording San Giovanni Battista by Stradella in a church in Perugia in 1949. They made me listen to the tape and I cried my eyes out. I wanted to stop everything, to give up singing... Also now even though I don't like my voice, I've become able to accept it and to be detached and objective about it so I can say, "Oh, that was really well sung," or "It was nearly perfect."

Maestro Carlo Maria Giulini has described the appeal of Callas's voice:

It is very difficult to speak of the voice of Callas. Her voice was a very special instrument. Something happens sometimes with string instruments—violin, viola, cello—where the first moment you listen to the sound of this instrument, the first feeling is a bit strange sometimes. But after just a few minutes, when you get used to, when you become friends with this kind of sound, then the sound becomes a magical quality. This was Callas. On the other hand, music critic John Ardoin has argued that Callas was the reincarnation of the nineteenth century soprano sfogato or "unlimited soprano", a throwback to Maria Malibran and Giuditta Pasta, for whom many of the famous bel canto operas were written. He avers that like Pasta and Malibran, Callas was a natural mezzo-soprano whose range was extended through training and willpower, resulting in a voice which "lacked the homogeneous color and evenness of scale once so prized in singing. There were unruly sections of their voices never fully under control. Many who heard Pasta, for example, remarked that her uppermost notes seemed produced by ventriloquism, a charge which would later be made against Callas".

Vocal size and range

Regarding the sheer size of Callas's instrument, Celletti says, "Her voice was penetrating. The volume as such was average: neither small nor powerful. But the penetration, allied to this incisive quality (which bordered on the ugly because it frequently contained an element of harshness) ensured that her voice could be clearly heard anywhere in the auditorium." In his book, Michael Scott makes the distinction that whereas Callas's pre-1954 voice was a "dramatic soprano with an exceptional top", after the weight loss, it became, as one Chicago critic described the voice in Lucia, however, this claim is refuted by John Ardoin's review of the live recording of the performance as well as by the review of the recording in Opera News, both of which refer to the note as a high E-natural. For Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, "the most fantastic thing was the possibility for her to sing the soprano coloratura with this big voice! This was something really special. Fantastic absolutely!" she considered herself first and foremost "a musician, that is, the first instrument of the orchestra." Maestro Victor de Sabata confided to Walter Legge, "If the public could understand, as we do, how deeply and utterly musical Callas is, they would be stunned", Callas possessed an innate architectural sense of line-proportion

In addition to her musical skills, Callas had a particular gift for language and the use of language in music. Soprano Martina Arroyo states, "What interested me most was how she gave the runs and the cadenzas words. That always floored me. I always felt I heard her saying something – it was never just singing notes. That alone is an art." Callas was not, however, a realistic or verismo style actress: Mathew Gurewitsch adds,

In fact the essence of her art was refinement. The term seems odd for a performer whose imagination and means of expression were so prodigious. She was eminently capable of the grand gesture; still, judging strictly from the evidence of her recordings, we know (and her few existing film clips confirm) that her power flowed not from excess but from unbroken concentration, unfaltering truth in the moment. It flowed also from irreproachable musicianship. People say that Callas would not hesitate to distort a vocal line for dramatic effect. In the throes of operatic passion plenty of singers snarl, growl, whine, and shriek. Callas was not one of them. She found all she needed in the notes.

Ewa Podles likewise stated that "It's enough to hear her, I’m positive! Because she could say everything only with her voice! I can imagine everything, I can see everything in front of my eye." Sandro Sequi recalls, "She was never in a hurry. Everything was very paced, proportioned, classical, precise... She was extremely powerful but extremely stylized. Her gestures were not many... I don't think she did more than 20 gestures in a performance. But she was capable of standing 10 minutes without moving a hand or finger, compelling everyone to look at her." However, witnesses to the interview stated that Callas only said "champagne with cognac", and it was a bystander who quipped, "No, with Coca-Cola", but the Time reporter attributed the latter comment to Callas.

Callas visited Tebaldi after a performance of Adriana Lecouvreur at the Met in the late 1960s, and the two were reunited. In 1978, Tebaldi spoke warmly of her late colleague and summarized this rivalry:

This rivality was really building from the people of the newspapers and the fans. But I think it was very good for both of us, because the publicity was so big and it created a very big interest about me and Maria and was very good in the end. But I don’t know why they put this kind of rivality, because the voice was very different. She was really something unusual. And I remember that I was very young artist too, and I stayed near the radio every time that I know that there was something on radio by Maria.

Louise Caselotti, who worked with Callas in 1946 and 1947, prior to her Italian debut, felt that it was not the heavy roles that hurt Callas's voice, but the lighter ones.

In the same vein, Joan Sutherland, who heard Callas throughout the 1950s, said in a BBC interview,

[Hearing Callas in Norma in 1952] was a shock, a wonderful shock. You just got shivers up and down the spine. It was a bigger sound in those earlier performances, before she lost weight. I think she tried very hard to recreate the sort of “fatness” of the sound which she had when she was as fat as she was. But when she lost the weight, she couldn’t seem to sustain the great sound that she had made, and the body seemed to be too frail to support that sound that she was making. Oh, but it was oh so exciting. It was thrilling. I don’t think that anyone who heard Callas after 1955 really heard the Callas voice.

Michael Scott has proposed that Callas's loss of strength and breath support was directly caused by her rapid and progressive weight-loss, This continual change in posture has been cited as visual proof of a progressive loss of breath support. It is also at this time that unsteady top notes first begin to appear.

There were others, however, who felt that the voice had benefitted from the weight loss. Of her performance of Norma in Chicago in 1954, Claudia Cassidy would write, "there is a slight unsteadiness in some of the sustained upper notes. but to me her voice is more beautiful in color, more even through the range, than it used to be".

Callas herself attributed her problems to a loss of confidence brought about by a loss of breath support, even though she does not make the connection between her weight and her breath support. In an April 1977 interview with journalist Philippe Caloni, she stated,

"My best recordings were made when I was skinny. and I say skinny, not slim, because I worked a lot and couldn't gain weight back; I became even too skinny. . . I had my greatest successes--Lucia, Sonnambula, Medea, Anna Bolena--when I was skinny as a nail. Even for my first time here in Paris in 1958 when the show was broadcast through Eurovision, I was skinny. Really skinny."

And shortly before her death, Callas confided her own thoughts on her vocal problems to Peter Dragadze:

I never lost my voice, but I lost strength in my diaphragm. ... Because of those organic complaints, I lost my courage and boldness. My vocal cords were and still are in excellent condition, but my 'sound boxes' have not been working well even though I have been to all the doctors. The result was that I overstrained my voice, and that caused it to wobble. (Gente, October 1, 1977) The scandal became notorious as the "Rome Walkout". Callas brought a lawsuit against the Rome Opera House, but by the time the case was settled thirteen years later and the Rome Opera was found to be at fault for having refused to provide an understudy,

Bing would later say that Callas was the most difficult artist he ever worked with, "because she was so much more intelligent. Other artists, you could get around. But Callas you could not get around. She knew exactly what she wanted, and why she wanted it." In his book about his wife, Meneghini states categorically that Maria Callas was unable to bear children. As well, various sources dismiss Gage's claim, as they note that the birth certificates Gage used to prove of this "secret child" were issued in 1998, twenty-one years after Callas's death. Still other sources claim that Callas had at least one abortion while involved with Onassis. The relationship ended nine years later in 1968, when Onassis left Callas in favour of Jacqueline Kennedy. However, the Onassis family's private secretary, Kiki, writes in her memoir that even while Aristotle was with Jackie, he frequently met up with Maria in Paris, where they resumed what had now become a clandestine affair.

Legacy

In late 2004, opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli made what many consider a bizarre claim that Callas may have been murdered by her confidant, Greek pianist Vasso Devetzi, in order to gain control of Callas's United States $9,000,000 estate. A more likely explanation is that Callas's death was due to heart failure brought on by (possibly unintentional) overuse of Mandrax (methaqualone), a sleeping aid.

According to biographer Stelios Galatopoulos, Devetzi insinuated herself into Callas's trust and acted virtually as her agent. This claim is corroborated by Iakintha (Jackie) Callas in her book Sisters, wherein she asserts that Devetzi conned Maria out of control of half of her estate, while promising to establish the Maria Callas Foundation to provide scholarships for young singers. After hundreds of thousands of dollars had allegedly vanished, Devetzi finally did establish the foundation.

In 2002, filmmaker Zeffirelli produced and directed a film in Callas's memory. Callas Forever was a highly fictionalized motion picture in which Callas was played by Fanny Ardant. It depicted the last months of Callas's life, when she was seduced into the making of a movie of Carmen, lip-synching to her 1964 recording of that opera.

In 2007, Callas was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In the same year, she was voted the greatest soprano of all time by BBC Music Magazine.

The 30th anniversary of the death of Maria Callas was selected as main motif for a high value euro collectors' coins; the €10 Greek Maria Callas commemorative coin, minted in 2007. Her image is shown in the obverse of the coin, while on the reverse the National Emblem of Greece with her signature is depicted.

On December 2, 2008, on the 85th anniversary of Callas's birth, a group of Greek and Italian officials unveiled a plaque in her honor at Flower Hospital (now the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center) where she was born. Made of Carrara marble and engraved in Italy, the plaque reads, "Maria Callas was born in this hospital on December 2, 1923. These halls heard for the first time the musical notes of her voice, a voice which has conquered the world. To this great interpreter of universal language of music, with gratitude."

Gus Van Sant's 2008 movie Milk features selected recordings of Callas' rendition of Tosca, which, it is suggested, was an opera of which Harvey Milk was particularly fond. Similarly, Jonathan Demme's 1993 movie Philadelphia features a recording by Callas.

A number of musical artists including Linda Ronstadt, Patti Smith and Emmylou Harris have mentioned Callas as a great musical influence, and some have paid tribute to Callas in their own music:

R.E.M. mention Callas in their song "E-Bow the Letter" from the album New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

Enigma named a song which featured samples of Callas's voice, on their 1991 album MCMXC a.D., "Callas Went Away".

Buffalo Tom's 2007 album Three Easy Pieces contains the song "C.C. and Callas", which appears to be about songwriter Chris Colbourn's reflections on Callas.

La Diva, on Celine Dion's 2007 French language album D'elles is about Maria Callas. The track samples the 1956 recording of La Boheme.

Singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright mentions Callas in his song "Beauty Mark", from his album Rufus Wainwright. Rufus is known to be an opera fan, particularly passionate about Callas's work. In an interview to the Spanish newspaper El País, he declared that one of the things anyone should do at least once in a lifetime was to listen to a Maria Callas album after a night out, if possible during sunrise. On Jonathan Ross' Radio 2 show he stated that Lord Harewood's interview of Callas is part of the inspiration for his opera Prima Donna.

Jason Mraz lists her performance of "O mio babbino caro" as a romantic musical influence for him.

Ben Sollee mentions her in his song "Mute with a Bullhorn."

Band Faithless sampled her voice on the intro to one of their songs on Reverence, "Drifting Away".

The Mountain Goats mention Callas in their song "Horseradish Road" from the album The Coroner's Gambit.

Notable recordings

All recordings are in mono unless otherwise indicated. Live performances are typically available on multiple labels.

Verdi, Nabucco, conducted by Vittorio Gui, live performance, Napoli, 20 December 1949

Verdi, Il trovatore, conducted by Guido Picco, live performance, Mexico City, June 20, 1950

Verdi, Aida, conducted by Oliviero De Fabritiis, live performance, Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, July 3, 1951

Ponchielli, La Gioconda, conducted by Antonino Votto, studio recording for Fonit Cetra, September 1952

Bellini, Norma, conducted by Vittorio Gui, live performance, Covent Garden, London, November 18, 1952

Verdi, Macbeth, conducted by Victor de Sabata, live performance, La Scala, Milan, December 7, 1952

Bellini, I puritani, conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, March–April 1953

Mascagni, Cavalleria rusticana, conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, August 1953

Puccini, Tosca, conducted by Victor de Sabata, studio recording for EMI, August 1953.

Verdi, La traviata, conducted by Gabriele Santini, studio recording for Fonit Cetra, September 1953

Cherubini, Medea, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, live performance, La Scala, Milan, December 10, 1953

Leoncavallo, Pagliacci, conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, June 1954

Spontini, La vestale, conducted by Antonino Votto, live performance, La Scala, Milan, December 7, 1954

Verdi, La traviata, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, live performance, La Scala, Milan, May 28, 1955

Puccini, Madama Butterfly, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, studio recording for EMI, August 1955

Verdi, Aida, conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, August 1955

Verdi, Rigoletto, conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, September 1955

Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, live performance, Berlin, September 29, 1955

Bellini, Norma, conducted by Antonino Votto, live performance, La Scala, Milan, December 7, 1955.

Verdi, Il trovatore, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, studio recording for EMI, August 1956

Puccini, La bohème, conducted by Antonino Votto, studio recording for EMI, August–September 1956. Like her later recording of Carmen, this was her only performance of the complete opera, as she never appeared onstage in it.

Verdi, Un ballo in maschera, conducted by Antonino Votto, studio recording for EMI, September 1956

Rossini, The Barber of Seville, conducted by Alceo Galliera, studio recording for EMI in stereo, February 1957

Bellini, La sonnambula, conducted by Antonino Votto, studio recording for EMI, March 1957

Donizetti, Anna Bolena, conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni, live performance, La Scala, Milan, April 14, 1957

Bellini, La sonnambula, conducted by Antonino Votto, live performance, Cologne, July 4, 1957

Puccini, Turandot, conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for EMI, July 1957

Cherubini, Medea, conducted by Tullio Serafin, studio recording for Ricordi in stereo, September 1957

Verdi, Un ballo in maschera, conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni, live performance, La Scala, Milan, December 7, 1957

Verdi, La traviata, conducted by Franco Ghione, live performance, Lisbon, March 27, 1958

Mad Scenes (excerpts from Anna Bolena, Bellini's Il pirata and Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet), conducted by Nicola Rescigno, studio recording for EMI in stereo, September 1958

Cherubini, Medea conducted by Nicola Rescigno, live performance at the Dallas Civic Opera in 1958; considered to be Callas's most notable performance of Cherubini's opera.

Ponchielli, La Gioconda, conducted by Antonino Votto, studio recording for EMI in stereo, September 1959

Puccini, Tosca, conducted by Carlo Felice Cillario, live performance, London, January 1964

Bizet, Carmen, conducted by Georges Prêtre, studio recording for EMI in stereo, 1964. It is her only performance of the role, and her only performance of the complete opera; she never appeared in it onstage. The recording used the recitatives added after Bizet's death. Callas's performance caused critic Harold C. Schonberg to speculate in his book The Glorious Ones that Callas perhaps should have sung mezzo roles instead of simply soprano ones.

Puccini, Tosca, conducted by Georges Prêtre, studio recording for EMI in stereo, December 1964.

References

In "All love (Solo amore)" cd - June 2010,Santeramo Musica Release - by Giovanni Tangorra composer, a track her dedicated: "Rainha Maria (Onassis story)": singer Marika Spadafino, guitar Nicola Albano

Bibliography

External links

Divina Callas's official website

Maria Callas International Club

German Maria Callas Club

Newsreel on Maria Callas' "Rome Walkout"

International Jose Guillermo Carrillo Foundation

A very extensive and accurate list of all her performances and recordings by Frank Hamilton

Discography (Capon's Lists of Opera Recordings)

Music in MP3 format

Visit Maria Callas at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

Maria Callas in an excerpt from Tosca (1956).

"Living and Dying for Art and Love" Free documentary on her last performance(ClassicalTV)

Eva Mendes to play Maria Callas in film based on "Greek Fire"

The YouTube channel dedicated to Maria Callas and her art

Maria Callas: Voice Of Perfect Imperfection by NPR

Articles on Callas Indepth articles discussing Callas's recorded legacy by Dr. Robert E. Seletsky and Milan Petkovic.

Category:1923 births Category:1977 deaths Category:Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in France Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Greek artists Category:Greek female singers Category:Greek opera singers Category:Greek sopranos Category:Operatic sopranos

Name	Bryn Terfel CBE
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Bryn Terfel Jones
Born	Pant Glas, Gwynedd,Wales
Occupation	Opera singer (Bass-baritone)
Spouse	Lesley Terfel
Children	3

Bryn Terfel Jones CBE (; born 9 November 1965) is a Welsh bass-baritone opera and concert singer. Terfel was initially associated with the roles of Mozart, particularly Figaro and Leporello, but has subsequently shifted his attention to heavier roles, especially those by Wagner.

Biography

Bryn Terfel Jones was born in Pant Glas, North Wales, the son of a farmer. He knew of another Welsh baritone named Bryn Jones, so Terfel chose Bryn Terfel as his professional name. Terfel had an interest in and talent for music from a very young age. A family friend taught him how to sing, starting with traditional Welsh songs. After winning numerous competitions for his singing, Terfel moved to London in 1984 and entered the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he studied under Rudolf Piernay. (He has recorded that he initially applied to the music college in Cardiff but when the reply was addressed to ‘Miss Terfel’ he was so annoyed a Welsh College did not know Bryn was a man's name he switched to London). He graduated in 1989, winning both the Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Award and the Gold Medal. He came in second behind Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the Cardiff BBC Singer of the World Competition the same year, though he won the Lieder Prize.

Career

In 1990, Terfel made his operatic début as Guglielmo in Così fan tutte at the Welsh National Opera, and later in the same season he sang the title role in The Marriage of Figaro, a role with which he made his debut with the English National Opera in 1991. His international operatic career began that same year when he sang the Speaker in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels and made his United States début as Figaro at the Santa Fe Opera.

In 1992, he made his Royal Opera House, Covent Garden début as Masetto in Don Giovanni, with Thomas Allen in the title role. That same year Terfel made his Salzburg Easter Festival debut singing the role of the Spirit Messenger in Die Frau ohne Schatten. This was followed by an international breakthrough at the main Salzburg Festival when he sang Jochanaan in Strauss's Salome. Terfel went on to make his début as Figaro at the Vienna State Opera and his debut at Covent Garden as Masetto in Don Giovanni. That year, he also signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon, and returned to the Welsh National Opera to sing Ford in Falstaff. In 1993, he recorded the role of Wilfred Shadbolt in The Yeomen of the Guard, by Gilbert and Sullivan and sang Figaro to acclaim at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Terfel has said that he would like to record "an album of Gilbert and Sullivan arias".

In 1994, Terfel sang Figaro at Covent Garden, and made both his Metropolitan Opera and Teatro Nacional de São Carlos débuts in the same role. He also sang Mahler's Eighth Symphony at the Ravinia Festival under the baton of James Levine. However, back surgery in 1994 (and again in 2000) prevented him from performing in several scheduled events. In 1996, Terfel expanded his repertoire to include Wagner, singing Wolfram in Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera, and Stravinsky, singing Nick Shadow in The Rake's Progress at the Welsh National Opera.

In 1997, Terfel made his La Scala début as Figaro. In 1998, Bryn had a recital at Carnegie Hall which included works by Wolf, Fauré, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, and others. In 1999, Terfel performed in Paris the title role of Don Giovanni for the first time and sang his first Falstaff at the Lyric Opera of Chicago; the latter of which he reprised in the inaugural production at the newly refurbished Royal Opera House.

In 2007, Terfel performed at the opening gala concert for the re-dedication of the Salt Lake Tabernacle with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on April 6–7. Later, Terfel performed the title role in a concert version of Sweeney Todd that had four performances from July 5 to July 7 at London's Royal Festival Hall. This was the idea of him and his fellow bass-baritone and friend, the Irishman Dermot Malone.

Terfel has not shied away from popular music either. He has recorded CDs of songs by Lerner and Loewe and Rodgers and Hammerstein. In 2001 he commissioned and performed Atgof o'r Ser ('The Memory of Stars') in the National Eisteddfod with the composer Robat Arwyn.

In September 2007, Terfel withdrew, to severe criticism, from Covent Garden's Ring Cycle when his six-year-old son required several operations on his finger. But the singer did successfully return to the Met in November 2007 to sing the role of Figaro. He told reporters in New York that he will now retire Figaro from his repertoire.

Terfel intended to take 2008 as a sabbatical from opera performances, but broke this to take the title role in WNO's revival of Falstaff. He had sung in this production in 1993, when he played the role of Ford.

In 2009 Terfel sang Scarpia and the Dutchman for the Royal Opera House.

In 2010, Terfel made his debut as Hans Sachs in Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in a production for Welsh National Opera, in Cardiff and on tour. On 17 July 2010, the cast of this production gave a "concert staging" at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the 2010 BBC Proms, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and on BBC Four television. On 31 July, again at the Proms, he performed in a concert from the Royal Albert Hall celebrating the works of Stephen Sondheim, in his 80th birthday year. On 27 September he led the opening of the Met's new season in New York singing Wotan in the premiere of the production of Das Rheingold that begins Robert Lepage's, and the Met's, new staging of the complete Wagner Ring; he continues with Die Walküre in spring 2011.

Personal life

He is married to his childhood sweetheart, Lesley; the couple have three children: Tomos, Morgan, and Deio Sion.

The family lives in Bontnewydd, near Caernarfon, Gwynedd. Terfel was a leading petitioner in the creation of Bontnewydd railway station on the rebuilt Welsh Highland Railway, and in part sponsored its construction.

Honours and awards

Terfel has been awarded the honour, by the Eisteddfod, of becoming a member of the Gorsedd of Bards. Created in 1792 as celebration of Welsh heritage, Gorsedd inductees are considered to have contributed to Welsh culture.

In 2003, Terfel became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, receiving the honour from the Prince of Wales. In 2006, he became the second recipient of the Queen's Medal for Music (the previous recipient was conductor Sir Charles Mackerras). In 2008, he was appointed an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.

Terfel is also President of the Welsh homelessness charity Shelter Cymru and is Patron of Bobath Children's Therapy Centre Wales, a registered charity based in Cardiff which provides specialist Bobath therapy to children from all over Wales who have cerebral palsy.

Faenol Festival

Starting in 2000, Terfel started the Faenol Festival near Snowdonia in Wales. Billed as "Bryn Terfel's Faenol Festival" (often referred to as "BrynFest" or known locally in Welsh as "Gŵyl Y Faenol"), it turned into an annual music festival featuring internationally famous opera singers as well as popular Welsh artists. In the same year he released We'll Keep a Welcome - The Welsh Album, an anthology of favourite traditional songs. In 2009 and again in 2010, he was forced to cancel the festival due to low public bookings, after having been voted a £250,000 grant by the Welsh Assembly.

Operatic repertoire

These are roles that Terfel has performed on stage

{|class="wikitable sortable" !Composer!!Opera!!Role!!In repertoire!!Recorded |- |Britten||Peter Grimes||Balstrode||1995||No |- |Donizetti||L'elisir d'amore||Dulcamara||2001||Yes (dvd) |- |Gounod||Faust||Mephistopheles||2004||Yes (dvd) |- |Mozart||Così fan tutte||Guglielmo||1991||No |- |Mozart||Don Giovanni||Masetto||1992||Yes |- |Mozart||Don Giovanni||Leporello||1991||Yes |- |Mozart||Don Giovanni||Don Giovanni||1999 –||Yes |- |Mozart||Die Zauberflöte||Speaker||1991||No |- |Mozart||Le nozze di Figaro||Figaro||1991–2007||Yes |- |Offenbach||Les contes d'Hoffmann||Four male roles||2000||Yes (dvd) |- |Puccini||Gianni Schicchi||Gianni Schicchi||2007||No |- |Puccini||Tosca||Scarpia||||Yes |- |Puccini||Madama Butterfly||Sharpless||1996||No |- |Richard Strauss||Die Frau ohne Schatten||Der Geisterbote||1992||Yes |- |Richard Strauss||Salome||Jochanaan||1993||Yes |- |Sondheim||||Sweeney Todd||2002 –||No |- |Stravinsky||The Rake's Progress||Nick Shadow||1996–2000||Yes |- |Stravinsky||Oedipus Rex||Creon||1992||Yes |- |Verdi||Falstaff||Falstaff||1999 –||Yes |- |Verdi||Falstaff||Ford||1993||No |- |Wagner||Das Rheingold||Donner||1993||No |- |Wagner||Das Rheingold||Wotan||2005 –||No |- |Wagner||Die Walküre||Wotan||2005 –||No |- |Wagner||Tannhäuser||Wolfram||1998||No |- |Wagner||Der fliegende Holländer||Holländer||2006 –||No |- |Wagner||Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg||Hans Sachs||2010||Concert staging of Welsh National Opera production broadcast by BBC Radio 3 and BBC Four television as part of BBC Proms |- |-class="sortbottom" |}

References

External links

Bryn Terfel at Official Deutsche Grammophon site

Terfeliaid: Official site for followers of Terfel

www.brynfest.com Faenol Festival

Bryn Terfel biography from BBC Wales

Official Universal Classics and Jazz Website

Bryn Terfel Interview at What's on in Wales

Category:1965 births Category:Alumni of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Living people Category:People from Gwynedd Category:Operatic bass-baritones Category:Welsh Eisteddfod winners Category:Welsh male singers Category:Welsh opera singers Category:Welsh-language music Category:Welsh-speaking people Category:Bards of the Gorsedd Category:Welsh baritones Category:Honorary Members of the Royal Academy of Music Category:Bass-baritones

Arturo Toscanini (; March 25, 1867 – January 16, 1957) was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his brilliant intensity, his restless perfectionism, his phenomenal ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory. As music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra he became a household name (especially in the USA) through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the operatic and symphonic repertoire. He is widely considered to have been one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. Although subjective opinions differ on the relative greatness of different conductors, during his lifetime Toscanini was the preeminent classical musician of the day.

Biography

Toscanini was born in Parma, Emilia–Romagna, and won a scholarship to the local music conservatory, where he studied the cello. He joined the orchestra of an opera company, with which he toured South America in 1886. While presenting Aida in Rio de Janeiro, Leopoldo Miguez, the locally hired conductor, reached the summit of a two-month escalating conflict with the performers due to his rather poor command of the work, to the point that the singers went on strike and forced the company's impresario to seek a substitute conductor. But on the evening of June 30, 1886 maestro Carlo Superti found himself booed by the audience, now prompted by the disgruntled Miguez. Yet another last-minute substitute conductor, Aristide Venturi, could not overcome a hostile, hollering public, and was forced to leave the podium. In desperation, the singers suggested the name of their assistant Chorus Master, who knew the whole opera by heart. Although he had no conducting experience, Toscanini was forcibly persuaded by the musicians to take up the baton at 9:15 P.M., discarded the score, and led a sensational performance of the two-and-a-half hour opera completely from memory. The public was taken by surprise, at first by the youth and sheer aplomb of this unknown conductor, then by his solid mastery. The result was astounding acclaim. For the rest of that season Toscanini conducted eighteen operas, all with absolute success. Thus began his career as a conductor, at age 19.

Upon returning to Italy, Toscanini set out on a dual path for some time. He continued to conduct, his first appearance in Italy being at the Teatro Carignano in Turin, on November 4, 1886, in the world premiere of the revised version of Alfredo Catalani's Edmea (it had had its premiere in its original form at La Scala, Milan, on 27 February of that year). This was the beginning of Toscanini's life-long friendship and championing of Catalani; he even named his first daughter Wally after the heroine of Catalani's opera La Wally. However, he also returned to his chair in the cello section, and participated as cellist in the world premiere of Verdi's Otello (La Scala, Milan, 1887) under the composer's supervision. Verdi, who habitually complained that conductors never seemed interested in directing his scores the way he had written them, was impressed by reports from Arrigo Boito about Toscanini's ability to interpret his scores. The composer was also impressed when Toscanini consulted him personally about the Te Deum, suggesting an allargando where it was not set out in the score. Verdi said that he had left it out for fear that "certain interpreters would have exaggerated the marking".

Gradually the young musician's reputation as an operatic conductor of unusual authority and skill supplanted his cello career. In the following decade he consolidated his career in Italy, entrusted with the world premieres of Puccini's La bohème and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. In 1896, Toscanini conducted his first symphonic concert (in Turin, with works by Schubert, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner). He exhibited a considerable capacity for hard work: in 1898 he conducted 43 concerts in Turin. By 1898 he was principal conductor at La Scala, where he remained until 1908, returning as Music Director, 1921-1929. He took the Scala Orchestra to the United States on a concert tour in 1920/21; it was during that tour that Toscanini made his first recordings (for the Victor Talking Machine Company).

International recognition

Outside of Europe, he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (1908–1915) as well as the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (1926–1936). He toured Europe with the New York Philharmonic in 1930; he and the musicians were acclaimed by critics and audiences wherever they went. Toscanini was the first non-German conductor to appear at Bayreuth (1930–1931), and the New York Philharmonic was the first non-German orchestra to play there. In the 1930s he conducted at the Salzburg Festival (1934–1937) and the inaugural concert in 1936 of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (later renamed the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) in what later became Tel Aviv, and later performed with them in Jerusalem, Haifa, Cairo and Alexandria.

Opposition to Italian fascist government

In 1919, Toscanini ran unsuccessfully as a Fascist parliamentary candidate in Milan. He had been called "the greatest conductor in the world" by Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. However, he became disillusioned with fascism and repeatedly defied the Italian dictator after the latter's ascent to power in 1922. He refused to display Mussolini's photograph or conduct the Fascist anthem Giovinezza at La Scala. He raged to a friend, "If I were capable of killing a man, I would kill Mussolini."

At a memorial concert for Italian composer Giuseppe Martucci on May 14, 1931 at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, he was ordered to begin by playing Giovinezza but he refused even though the fascist foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano was present in the audience. Afterwards he was, in his own words, "attacked, injured and repeatedly hit in the face" by a group of blackshirts. Mussolini, incensed by the conductor's refusal, had his phone tapped, placed him under constant surveillance and took away his passport. The passport was returned only after world outcry over Toscanini's treatment.

The NBC Symphony Orchestra

Fleeing Italy, he returned to the United States where the NBC Symphony Orchestra was created for him in 1937. He conducted his first NBC broadcast concert on December 25, 1937, in NBC Studio 8-H in New York City's Rockefeller Center. The acoustics of the specially built studio were very dry; some remodeling in 1939 added a bit more reverberation. (In 1950, the studio was further remodeled for television productions; today it is used by NBC for Saturday Night Live. In 1980, it was used by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a series of special televised NBC concerts called "Live From Studio 8H", the first one being a tribute to Toscanini, punctuated by clips from his television concerts.)

The NBC broadcasts were preserved on large transcription discs, recorded at both 78-rpm and 33-1/3 rpm, until NBC began using magnetic tape in 1947. NBC used special RCA high fidelity microphones both for the broadcasts and for recording them; these microphones can be seen in some photographs of Toscanini and the orchestra. Some of Toscanini's recording sessions for RCA Victor were mastered on sound film in a process developed about 1941, as detailed by RCA producer Charles O'Connell in his memoirs, On and Off The Record. In addition, hundreds of hours of Toscanini's rehearsals with the NBC were preserved and are now housed in the Toscanini Legacy archive at The New York Public Library.

Toscanini was often criticized for neglecting American music; however, on November 5, 1938, he conducted the world premieres of two orchestral works by Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings and Essay for Orchestra. In 1945, he led the orchestra in recording sessions of the Grand Canyon Suite by Ferde Grofé in Carnegie Hall (supervised by Grofé) and An American in Paris by George Gershwin in NBC's Studio 8-H. He also conducted broadcast performances of Copland's El Salon Mexico; Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with soloists Earl Wild and Benny Goodman and Piano Concerto in F with pianist Oscar Levant; and music by other American composers, including marches of John Philip Sousa. He even wrote his own orchestral arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner, which was incorporated into the NBC Symphony's performances of Verdi's Hymn of the Nations. (Earlier, while music director of the New York Philharmonic, he conducted music by Abram Chasins, Bernard Wagenaar, and Howard Hanson.)

In 1940, Toscanini took the orchestra on a "goodwill" tour of South America. Later that year, Toscanini had a disagreement with NBC management over their use of his musicians in other NBC broadcasts. This, among other reasons, resulted in a letter which Toscanini wrote on 10 March 1941 to RCA's David Sarnoff. He stated that he now wished "to withdraw from the militant scene of Art" and thus declined to sign a new contract for the up-coming winter season, but left the door open for an eventual return "if my state of mind, health and rest will be improved enough". So Leopold Stokowski was engaged on a three-year contract instead and served as the NBC Symphony's music director from 1941 until 1944. Toscanini's state of mind soon underwent a change and he returned as Stokowski's co-conductor for the latter's second and third seasons resuming full control in 1944.

One of the more remarkable broadcasts was in July 1942, when Toscanini conducted the American premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7. Due to World War II, the score was microfilmed in the Soviet Union and brought by courier to the United States. Stokowski had previously given the US premieres of Shostakovich's 1st, 3rd and 6th Symphonies in Philadelphia, and in December 1941 urged NBC to obtain the score of the 7th as he wanted to conduct its premiere as well. But Toscanini coveted this for himself and there were a number of remarkable letters between the two conductors (reproduced by Harvey Sachs in his biography) before Stokowski agreed to let Toscanini have the privilege of conducting the first performance. Unfortunately for New York listeners, a major thunderstorm virtually obliterated the NBC radio signals there, but the performance was heard elsewhere and preserved on transcription discs. It was later issued by RCA Victor in the 1967 centennial boxed set tribute to Toscanini, which included a number of NBC broadcasts never released on discs. In Testimony Shostakovich himself expressed a dislike for the performance, after he heard a recording of the broadcast. In Toscanini's later years he expressed dislike for the work and amazement that he had actually conducted it.

In the summer of 1950, Toscanini led the orchestra on an extensive transcontinental tour. It was during that tour that the well-known photograph of Toscanini riding the ski lift at Sun Valley, Idaho was taken. Toscanini and the musicians traveled on a special train chartered by NBC.

The NBC concerts continued in Studio 8-H until the fall of 1950. They were then held in Carnegie Hall, where many of the orchestra's recording sessions had been held, due to the dry acoustics of Studio 8-H. The final broadcast performance, an all-Wagner program, took place on April 4, 1954, in Carnegie Hall. During this concert Toscanini suffered a memory lapse reportedly caused by a transient ischemic attack, although some have attributed the lapse to having been secretly informed that NBC intended to end the broadcasts and disband the NBC orchestra. He never conducted live in public again. That June, he participated in his final recording sessions, remaking portions of two Verdi operas so they could be commercially released. Toscanini was 87 years old when he retired. After his retirement, the NBC Symphony was reorganized as the Symphony of the Air, making regular performances and recordings, until it was disbanded in 1963.

On radio, he conducted seven complete operas, including La bohème and Otello, all of which were eventually released on records and CD, thus enabling the modern listening public to have at least some idea of what an opera conducted by Toscanini sounded like.

Final years

With the help of his son Walter, Toscanini spent his remaining years editing tapes and transcriptions of his performances with the NBC Symphony. The "approved" recordings were issued by RCA Victor, which also has issued his recordings with the La Scala Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. His recordings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1937–39) and the Philharmonia Orchestra (1952) were issued by EMI. Various companies have issued recordings on compact discs of a number of broadcasts and concerts that he did not officially approve. Among these are stereophonic recordings of his last two NBC broadcast concerts.

Sachs and other biographers have documented the numerous conductors, singers, and musicians who visited Toscanini during his retirement. He was a big fan of early television, especially boxing and wrestling telecasts, as well as comedy programs.

Toscanini died at age 89 of a stroke at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx in New York City on January 16, 1957. His body was returned to Italy and was interred in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan. His epitaph is taken from one account of his remarks concluding the 1926 premiere of Puccini's unfinished Turandot: "Qui finisce l'opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto" ("Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died [lit. 'is dead']"). During his funeral service, Leyla Gencer sang a part from Verdi's requiem.

In his will, he left his baton to his protégée Herva Nelli.

Toscanini was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.

Family

Toscanini married Carla De Martini on June 21, 1897, when she was not yet 20 years old. Their first child, Walter, was born on March 19, 1898. A daughter, Wally, was born on January 16, 1900. Carla gave birth to another boy, Giorgio, in September 1901, but he died of diphtheria on June 10, 1906. Then, that same year, Carla gave birth to their second daughter, Wanda.

Toscanini worked with many great singers and musicians throughout his career, but few impressed him as much as the Russian-American pianist Vladimir Horowitz. They worked together a number of times and even recorded Brahms' second piano concerto and Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto with the NBC Symphony for RCA. Horowitz also became close to Toscanini and his family. In 1933, Wanda Toscanini married Horowitz, with the conductor's blessings and warnings. It was Wanda's daughter, Sonia, who was once photographed by Life playing with the conductor.

During World War II, Toscanini lived in Wave Hill, a historic home in Riverdale.

Despite the reported infidelities revealed in Toscanini's letters documented by Harvey Sachs, he remained married to Carla until she died on June 23, 1951.

Innovations

At La Scala, which had what was then the most modern stage lighting system installed in 1901 and an orchestral pit installed in 1907, Toscanini pushed through reforms in the performance of opera. He insisted on dimming the house-lights during performances. As his biographer Harvey Sachs wrote: "He believed that a performance could not be artistically successful unless unity of intention was first established among all the components: singers, orchestra, chorus, staging, sets, and costumes."

Toscanini favored the traditional orchestral seating plan with the first violins and cellos on the left, the violas on the near right, and the second violins on the far right.

Premieres

Toscanini conducted the world premieres of many operas, four of which have become part of the standard operatic repertoire: Pagliacci, La bohème, La fanciulla del West and Turandot; he took an active role in Alfano's completion of Puccini's Turandot. He also conducted the first Italian performances of Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, Salome, Pelléas et Mélisande, Euryanthe as well as the South American premieres of Tristan und Isolde and Madama Butterfly and the North American premiere of Boris Godunov.

Edmea (revised version) by Alfredo Catalani – Turin, November 4, 1886

Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo – Milan, May 21, 1892

Guglielmo Swarten by Gnaga – Rome, November 15, 1892

Savitri by Natale Canti – Bologna, December 1, 1894

Emma Liona by Antonio Lozzi – Venice, May 24, 1895

La bohème by Giacomo Puccini – Turin, February 1, 1896

Forza d'Amore by Arturo Buzzi-Peccia – Turin, March 6, 1897

La Camargo by Enrico De Leva – Turin, March 2, 1898

Anton by Cesare Galeotii – Milan, December 17, 1900

Zaza by Leoncavallo – Milan, November 10, 1900

Le Maschere by Pietro Mascagni – Milan, January 17, 1901

Mosè by Don Lorenzo Perosi – Milan, November 16, 1901

Germania by Alberto Franchetti – Milan, March 11, 1902

Oceana by Antonio Smareglia – Milan, January 22, 1903

Cassandra by Vittorio Gnecchi – Bologna, December 5, 1905

Gloria by Francesco Cilea – Milan, April 15, 1907

La fanciulla del West by Puccini – New York, December 10, 1910

Madame Sans-Gène by Umberto Giordano – New York, January 25, 1915

Debora e Jaele by Ildebrando Pizzetti – Milan, December 16, 1922

Nerone by Arrigo Boito (completed by Toscanini and Vincenzo Tommasini) – Milan, May 1, 1924

La Cena delle Beffe by Giordano – Milan, December 20, 1924

I Cavalieri di Ekebu by Riccardo Zandonai – Milan, March 7, 1925

Turandot by Puccini – Milan, April 25, 1926

Fra Gherado by Pizzetti – Milan, May 16, 1928

Il Re by Giordano – Milan, January 12, 1929

Adagio for Strings and First Essay for Orchestra by Samuel Barber – NBC Symphony Orchestra, New York, November 5, 1938

Western Suite by Elie Siegmeister – NBC Symphony Orchestra, New York, November 1945.

Recorded legacy

Overview

Toscanini made his first recordings in December, 1920 with the La Scala Orchestra in the Trinity Church studio of the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey and his last with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in June, 1954 in Carnegie Hall. His entire catalog of commercial recordings was issued by RCA Victor, save for two single-sided recordings for Brunswick in 1926 with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and a series of excellent recordings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1939 for EMI's HMV label (some issued in the USA by RCA, others released only recently by EMI and Testament). Besides the 1926 recordings with the New York Philharmonic (his first with the electrical process), Toscanini made a series of recordings with them for Victor, in Carnegie Hall, in 1929 and 1936. He also recorded with the Philadelphia Orchestra for Victor in Philadelphia's Academy of Music in 1941 and 1942. All of the RCA Victor recordings have been digitally re-mastered and released on CD. There are also recorded concerts with various European orchestras, especially with La Scala Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Hearing Toscanini

In some of his recordings, Toscanini can be heard singing or humming. This is especially true in RCA's recording of La bohème, recorded during broadcast concerts in NBC Studio 8-H in 1946. Tenor Jan Peerce later said that Toscanini's deep involvement in the performances helped him to achieve the necessary emotions, especially in the final moments of the opera when the beloved Mimi (played by Licia Albanese) is dying. During the "Tuba mirum" section of the January 1951 live recording of Verdi's Requiem, Toscanini can be heard on the disc shouting as the brass blares. In his recording of Richard Strauss' Death and Transfiguration, Toscanini sighed loudly near the end of the music; RCA Victor left this in the released recording.

Specialties

He was especially famous for his performances of Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Debussy and his own compatriots Rossini, Verdi, Boito and Puccini. He made many recordings, especially towards the end of his career, which are still in print. In addition, there are many recordings available of his broadcast performances, as well as his remarkable rehearsals with the NBC Symphony.

Charles O'Connell on Toscanini

Charles O'Connell, who produced many of Toscanini's RCA Victor recordings in the 1930s and 1940s, said that RCA quickly decided to record the NBC Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, whenever possible, after being disappointed with the dull-sounding early recordings in Studio 8-H in 1938 and 1939. (Nevertheless, there were a few recording sessions in Studio 8-H as late as June 1950, probably because of improvements to the acoustics in 1939.) O'Connell, and others, often complained that Toscanini was little interested in recording and, as Harvey Sachs wrote, Toscanini was frequently disappointed that the microphones failed to pick up everything he heard during the recording sessions. O'Connell even complained of Toscanini's failure to cooperate with RCA during the sessions. Toscanini himself was often disappointed that the 78-rpm discs failed to fully capture all of the instruments in the orchestra; those fortunate to attend Toscanini's concerts later said the NBC string section was especially outstanding.

Philadelphia Orchestra recordings

O'Connell also extensively documented RCA's technical problems with the Philadelphia Orchestra recordings of 1941/42, which required extensive electronic editing before they could be released (well after Toscanini's death, beginning in 1963, with the rest following in the 1970s). Harvey Sachs also recounts that the masters were damaged, possibly due to somewhat inferior materials imposed by wartime restrictions. Unfortunately, a Musicians Union recording ban from 1942 to 1944 prevented immediate retakes; by the time the ban ended, the Philadelphia Orchestra had left RCA Victor for Columbia Records and RCA apparently was hesitant to promote the orchestra any further. Eventually, Toscanini recorded all of the same music with the NBC Symphony. In 1968, the Philadelphia Orchestra returned to RCA and the company was more favorable toward issuing all of the discs. As for the historic recordings, even on the CD versions, first released in 1991, some of the sides have considerable surface noise and some distortion, especially during the louder passages. The best sound of the recordings is the Schubert Symphony No. 9 (The "Great"), which had been restored by RCA first (in 1963) and released on LP. The rest of the recordings were not issued until 1977 and, as Sachs noted, by that time some of the masters may have deteriorated further. Nevertheless, despite the occasional problems, the entire set is an impressive document of Toscanini's collaboration with the Philadelphia musicians and can be best heard in the 2006 RCA reissue, which benefit from recent advances in digital restoration. The listener can hear the rich sound of the orchestra, developed by Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy, enhanced by the more dynamic and aggressive conducting of the Italian maestro. Ormandy especially expressed his appreciation for what Toscanini achieved with the orchestra.

High fidelity and stereo

In the late 1940s when magnetic tape replaced direct wax disc recording and high fidelity long playing records were introduced, the conductor said he was much happier making recordings. Sachs wrote that an Italian journalist, Raffaele Calzini, said Toscanini told him, "My son Walter sent me the test pressing of the [Beethoven] Ninth from America; I want to hear and check how it came out, and possibly to correct it. These long-playing records often make me happy."

NBC had recorded all of Toscanini's broadcast performances on transcription discs from the start of the broadcasts in 1937. The use of high fidelity sound film was common for recording sessions, as early as 1941. By 1948, when RCA began using magnetic tape on a regular basis, high fidelity became the norm for Toscanini's, and all other commercial recordings. With RCA's experiments in stereo in early 1954, stereo tapes were made of Toscanini's final two broadcast concerts, as well as the rehearsals, as documented by Samuel Antek in This Was Toscanini. The microphones were placed relatively close to the orchestra and with limited separation, so the stereo effects were not as dramatic as the commercial "Living Stereo" recordings which RCA Victor began to make about the same time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The two Toscanini concerts recorded in stereo have been issued on LP and CD and have also been offered for download in digitally enhanced sound by Pristine Classical, a company which produces digitally enhanced versions of older classical recordings.

One more example of Toscanini and the NBC Symphony in stereo now also exists. It is of the January 27, 1951 concert devoted to the Verdi Requiem, previously recorded and released in high-fidelity monophonic sound by RCA Victor. Recently a separate recording of the same performance, using a different microphone in a different location, was acquired by Pristine Audio. Using modern digital technology the company constructed a stereophonic version of the performance from the two recordings which it made available in 2009. The company calls this an example of "accidental stereo".

Notable recordings

Among his most critically acclaimed recordings are the following (with the NBC Symphony unless otherwise shown):

(Many of these were never released officially during Toscanini's lifetime)

Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 "Eroica" (1953; also 1939 and 1949 recordings)

Beethoven, Symphony No. 6 "Pastoral" (1952)

Beethoven, Symphony No. 7 (1936, Philharmonic-Symphony of New York)

Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 (1952 and 1938) (only the 1952 recording was released officially)

Beethoven, Missa Solemnis, (1940 NBC broadcast)

Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette (1947 NBC broadcast)

Brahms, Symphony No. 1 (1940)

Brahms, Symphony No. 2 (1952 and February, 1948 broadcast)

Brahms, Symphony No. 4 (1951 and 1948 broadcast)

Brahms, Four Symphonies, Tragic Overture and Haydn Variations, 1952, Philharmonia Orchestra, London (his only appearances with that orchestra, produced by Walter Legge).

Debussy, La mer (1950 and 1940 broadcast)

Dvořák, Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" (1953)

Mendelssohn, Incidental Music from A Midsummer Night's Dream, (NBC 1947, studio and broadcast versions; Philadelphia 1941); Scherzo, New York Philharmonic, (1929)

Mendelssohn, Symphony No. 4 "Italian", (1954, exists in two versions: one as approved by Toscanini with excerpts from the rehearsals, and the unedited broadcast)

Mendelssohn, Symphony No. 5 "Reformation", (1953)

Puccini, La bohème (1946 broadcast)

Mozart, Die Zauberflöte (1937, Salzburg Festival; poor sound)

Schubert, Symphony No. 9 (Philadelphia, 1941; NBC 1947 and 1953)

Tchaikovsky, Piano concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23, Vladimir Horowitz and NBC Symphony, (live recording of April 25, 1943 War Bonds benefit concert at Carnegie Hall, first issued in 1959 on LP by RCA Victor)

Verdi, Requiem (1940 NBC broadcast; and 1951 studio recording)

Verdi, Un ballo in maschera (1954 NBC broadcast)

Verdi, Falstaff (1937, Salzburg Festival with restored sound on the Andante label; 1950 NBC broadcast)

Verdi, Rigoletto (Act IV only, 1944; from World War II Red Cross benefit concert held in Madison Square Garden, with the combined forces of the New York Philharmonic and the NBC Symphony; the entire concert, complete with an auctioning of one of Toscanini's batons, was released on an unofficial recording in 1995)

Verdi, Otello (1947 NBC broadcast)

Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1937, Salzburg Festival; original Selenophone sound-on-film recording restored on Andante.)

Rarities

There are many pieces which Toscanini never recorded in the studio; among these, some of the most interesting surviving recordings (off-the-air) include: Meyerbeer Overture to Dinorah (1938, on Testament)

Stravinsky, Suite from Petrushka (1940, on RCA Victor)

Mendelssohn, Symphony No. 3 "Scottish" (1941, on Testament)

Franz Schubert, Symphony No. 2 (1940, on Testament)

Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7 "Leningrad" (1942, on RCA Victor)

Vasily Kalinnikov, Symphony No. 1 (1943, on Testament)

Schumann, Symphony No. 2 (1946, on Testament)

Boito, scenes from Mefistofele and Nerone, La Scala, Milan, 1948 – Boito Memorial Concert.

Mussorgsky, Prelude to Khovanshchina (1953)

Rehearsals and broadcasts

Many hundreds of hours of Toscanini's rehearsals were recorded. Some of these have circulated in limited edition recordings. Many broadcast recordings with orchestras other than the NBC have also survived, including: The New York Philharmonic from 1933–36, 1942, and 1945; The BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1935–1939; The Lucerne Festival Orchestra; and broadcasts from the Salzburg Festival in the late 1930s. Documents of Toscanini's guest appearances with the La Scala Orchestra from 1946 until 1952 include a live recording of Verdi's Requiem with the young Renata Tebaldi. Toscanini's ten NBC Symphony telecasts from 1948 until 1952 were preserved in kinescope films of the live broadcasts. These films, issued by RCA on VHS tape and laser disc and on DVD by Testament, provide unique video documentation of the passionate yet restrained podium technique for which he was well known.

Recording guide

A guide to Toscanini's recording career can be found in Mortimer H. Frank's "From the Pit to the Podium: Toscanini in America" in International Classical Record Collector (1998, 15 8-21) and Christopher Dyment's "Toscanini's European Inheritance" in International Classical Record Collector (1998, 15 22-8). Frank and Dyment also discuss Maestro Toscanini's performance history in the 50th anniversary issue of Classic Record Collector (2006, 47) Frank with 'Toscanini – Myth and Reality' (10–14) and Dyment 'A Whirlwind in London' (15–21) This issue also contains interviews with people who performed with Toscanini – Jon Tolansky 'Licia Albanese – Maestro and Me' (22-6) and 'A Mesmerising Beat: John Tolansky talks to some of those who worked with Arturo Toscanini, to discover some of the secrets of his hold over singers, orchestras and audiences.' (34-7). There is also a feature article on Toscanini's interpretation of Brahms's First Symphony – Norman C. Nelson, 'First Among Equals [...] Toscanini's interpretation of Brahms's First Symphony in the context of others' (28–33)

The Arturo Toscanini Society

In 1969, Clyde J. Key acted on a dream he had of meeting Toscanini by starting the Arturo Toscanini Society to release a number of "unapproved" live performances by Toscanini. As Time Magazine reported, Key scoured the U.S. and Europe for off-the-air transcriptions of Toscanini broadcasts, acquiring almost 5,000 transcriptions (all transferred to tape) of previously unreleased material—a complete catalogue of broadcasts by the Maestro between 1933 and 1954. It included about 50 concerts that were never broadcast, but which were recorded surreptitiously by engineers supposedly testing their equipment.

A private, nonprofit club based in Dumas, Texas, it offered members five or six LPs annually for a $25-a-year membership fee. Key's first package offering included Brahms' German Requiem, Haydn's Symphonies Nos. 88 and 104, and Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben, all NBC Symphony broadcasts dating from the late 1930s or early 1940s. In 1970, the Society releases included Sibelius' Symphony No. 4, Mendelssohn's "Scotish" Symphony, dating from the same NBC period; and a Rossini-Verdi-Puccini LP emanating from the post-War reopening of La Scala on May 11, 1946 with the Maestro conducting. That same year it released a Beethoven bicentennial set that included the 1935 Missa Solemnis with the Philharmonic and LPs of the 1948 televised concert of the ninth symphony taken from an FM radio transcription, complete with Ben Grauer's comments. (In the early 1990s, the kinescopes of these and the other televised concerts were released by RCA with soundtracks dubbed in from the NBC radio transcriptions; in 2006, they were re-released by Testament on DVD.)

Additional releases included a number of Beethoven symphonies recorded with the New York Philharmonic during the 1930s, a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27 on Feb. 20, 1936, at which Rudolf Serkin made his New York debut, and one of the most celebrated underground Toscanini recordings of all, the legendary 1940 version of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, which has better soloists (Zinka Milanov, Jussi Bjoerling, both in their prime) and a more powerful style than the 1953 recording now available on RCA/BMG, although the microphone placement was kinder to the soloists in 1953.

Because the Arturo Toscanini Society was nonprofit, Key said he believed he had successfully bypassed both copyright restrictions and the maze of contractual ties between RCA and the Maestro's family. However, RCA's attorneys were soon looking into the matter to see if they agreed. As long as it stayed small, the Society appeared to offer little real competition to RCA. But classical-LP profits were low enough even in 1970, and piracy by fly-by-night firms so prevalent within the industry (an estimated $100 million in tape sales for 1969 alone), that even a benevolent buccaneer outfit like the Arturo Toscanini Society had to be looked at twice before it could be tolerated.

Magazine and newspaper reports subsequently detailed legal action taken against Key and the Society, presumably after some of the LPs began to appear in retail stores. Toscanini fans and record collectors were dismayed because, although Toscanini had not approved the release of these performances in every case, many of them were found to be further proof of the greatness of the Maestro's musical talents. One outstanding example of a remarkable performance not approved by the Maestro was his December 1948 NBC broadcast of Dvořák's Symphonic Variations, released on an LP by the Society. (A kinescope of the same performance, from the television simulcast, has been released on VHS and laser disc by RCA/BMG and on DVD by Testament.) There was speculation that, the Toscanini family itself, prodded by his daughter Wanda, sought to defend the Maestro's original decisions, made mostly during his last years, on what should be released. Walter Toscanini later admitted that his father probably rejected performances that were okay. Whatever the real reasons, the Arturo Toscanini Society was forced to disband and cease releasing any further recordings.

Television

Arturo Toscanini was one of the first conductors to make extended appearances on live television. Between 1948 and 1952, he conducted ten concerts telecast on NBC, including a two-part concert performance of Verdi's complete opera Aida starring Herva Nelli and Richard Tucker, and the first complete telecast of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. All of these were simulcast on radio. These concerts were all shown only once during that four-year span, but they were preserved on kinescopes.

The telecasts began on March 20, 1948, with an all-Wagner program, including the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin; the overture and bacchanale from Tannhäuser; "Forest Murmurs" from Siegfried; "Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey" from Götterdämmerung; and "The Ride of the Valkyries" from Die Walküre. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was telecast on April 3, 1948. On November 13, 1948, there was an all-Brahms program, including the Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra in A minor (Mischa Mischakoff, violin; Frank Miller, cello); Liebeslieder-Walzer, Op. 52 (with two pianists and a small chorus); and Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G minor. On December 3, 1948, Toscanini conducted Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor; Dvořák's Symphonic Variations; and Wagner's original overture to Tannhäuser.

There were two telecasts in 1949, both devoted to the performance of Verdi's Aida from studio 8H. Acts I and II were telecast on March 26 and III and IV on April 2. Portions of the audio were rerecorded in June 1954 for the commercial release on LP records. As the video shows, the soloists were placed close to Toscanini, in front of the orchestra, while the robed members of the Robert Shaw Chorale were on risers behind the orchestra.

There were no telecasts in 1950, but they resumed from Carnegie Hall on November 3, 1951, with Weber's overture to Euryanthe and Brahms' Symphony No. 1. On December 29, 1951, there was another all-Wagner program that included the two excerpts from Siegfried and Die Walküre featured on the March 1948 telecast, plus the Prelude to Act II of Lohengrin; the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde; and "Siegfried's Death and Funeral Music" from Götterdämmerung.

On March 15, 1952, Toscanini conducted the Symphonic Interlude from Franck's Rédemption; Sibelius's En Saga; Debussy's "Nuages" and "Fetes" from Nocturnes; and the overture of Rossini's William Tell. The final telecast, on March 22, 1952, included Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, and Respighi's The Pines of Rome.

The NBC cameras were often left on Toscanini for extended periods, documenting not only his baton techniques but his deep involvement in the music. At the end of a piece, Toscanini generally nodded rather than bowed and exited the stage quickly. Although NBC continued to broadcast the orchestra on radio until April 1954, telecasts were abandoned after March 1952.

As part of a restoration project initiated by the Toscanini family in the late 1980s, the kinescopes were fully restored and issued by RCA on VHS and laser disc beginning in 1989. The audio portion of the sound was taken, not from the noisy kinescopes, but from 33-1/3 rpm 16-inch transcription disc and high fidelity audio tape recordings made simultaneously by RCA technicians during the televised concerts. The hi-fi audio was synchronized with the kinescope video for the home video release. Original introductions by NBC's longtime announcer Ben Grauer were replaced with new commentary by Martin Bookspan. The entire group of Toscanini videos has since been reissued by Testament on DVD, with further improvements to the sound.

Film

In 1943, Toscanini made a 31-minute film for the United States Office of War Information called Hymn of the Nations, directed by Alexander Hammid. It was mostly filmed in NBC's Studio 8-H and consists of Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony in a performance of Verdi's Overture to La Forza del Destino and Verdi's "Hymn of the Nations" (Inno delle nazioni), which contains national anthems of England, France, and Italy (the World War I allied nations), to which Toscanini added the Soviet "Internationale" and "The Star Spangled Banner". Tenor Jan Peerce and the Westminster Choir performed in the latter work and the film was narrated by Burgess Meredith.

The film was released by RCA/BMG on DVD in 2004. By this time the "Internationale" had been cut from the 1943 film, but the complete "Hymn of the Nations" can still be heard in the audio recording which accompanied the DVD on a CD. Hymn of the Nations was nominated for a 1944 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

is a 1985 documentary made for cable television. The film features archival footage of the conductor and interviews with musicians who worked with him. This film was released on VHS and in 2004 on the same DVD with Hymn of the Nations.

Toscanini is the subject of the 1988 fictionalized biography Il giovane Toscanini (Young Toscanini), starring C. Thomas Howell and Elizabeth Taylor, and directed by Franco Zeffirelli. It received scathing reviews and was never officially released in the United States. The film is a fictional recounting of the events that led up to Toscanini making his conducting debut in Rio de Janeiro in 1886. Although nearly all of the plot is embellished, the events surrounding the sudden and unexpected conducting debut are based on fact.

Acclaim and criticism

Throughout his career, Toscanini was virtually idolized by the critics (a notable exception being Virgil Thomson), as well as by most fellow musicians and the public alike. He enjoyed the kind of consistent critical acclaim during his life that few other musicians have had. Toscanini was featured three times on the cover of Time magazine, in 1926, 1934, and again in 1948. In the magazine's history, he is the only conductor to have been so honored. On March 25, 1989, the United States Postal Service issued a 25 cent postage stamp in his honor.

Over the past thirty years or so, however, as a new generation has appeared, there has been an increasing amount of revisionist criticism directed at him. These critics contend that Toscanini was ultimately a detriment to American music rather than an asset because of the tremendous marketing of him by RCA as the greatest conductor of all time and his preference to perform mostly older European music. According to Harvey Sachs, Mortimer Frank, and B. H. Haggin, this criticism can be traced to the lack of focus on Toscanini as a conductor rather than his legacy. Frank, in his recent book Toscanini: The NBC Years, rejects this revisionism quite strongly, and cites the author Joseph Horowitz (author of Understanding Toscanini) as perhaps the most extreme of these critics. Frank writes that this revisionism has unfairly influenced younger listeners and critics, who may have not heard as many of Toscanini's performances as older listeners, and as a result, Toscanini's reputation, extraordinarily high in the years that he was active, has suffered a decline. Conversely, Joseph Horowitz contends that those who keep the Toscanini legend alive are members of a "Toscanini cult", an idea not altogether refuted by Frank, but not embraced by him, either.

Some contemporary critics, particularly Virgil Thomson, also took Toscanini to task for not paying enough attention to the "modern repertoire" (i.e., twentieth-century composers). During Toscanini's middle years, however, such now widely accepted composers as Claude Debussy, whose music the conductor held in very high regard, were considered to be radical and modern.

Another criticism leveled at Toscanini stems from the constricted sound quality that comes from many of his recordings, notably those made in NBC's Studio 8-H. Studio 8-H was foremost a radio and later a television studio, not a true concert hall. Its dry acoustics lacking in much reverberation, while ideal for broadcasting, were unsuited for symphonic concerts and opera. However, it is widely believed that Toscanini favored it because its close miking enabled listeners to hear every instrumental strand in the orchestra clearly, something that the conductor strongly believed in.

Toscanini has also been criticized for lack of nuance and metronomic (rhythmically too rigid) performances:

Others state (and there is some evidence from the recordings) that Toscanini's tempos, quite flowing in his earlier recordings, became stricter as he got older, although this is not to be taken as a literally true statement. His 1953 recording of Pictures at an Exhibition, for instance, and his 1950 La Mer, are considered masterpieces by many.

The Toscanini Legacy

In 1986, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts purchased the bulk of Toscanini's papers, scores and sound recordings from his heirs. Named The Toscanini Legacy, this vast collection contains thousands of letters, programs and various documents, over 1,800 scores and more than 400 hours of sound recordings. A finding aids for the scores and sound recordings is available on the library's website. In house finding aids are available for other parts of the collection.

The Library also has many other collections that have Toscanini materials in them, such as the Bruno Walter papers, the Fiorello H. La Guardia papers, and a collection of material from Rose Bampton.

Quotations

Of German composer Richard Strauss, whose political behavior during World War II was arguably very questionable: "To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again."

"The conduct of my life has been, is, and will always be the echo and reflection of my conscience."

"Gentlemen, be democrats in life but aristocrats in art."

Referring to the first movement of the Eroica: "To some it is Napoleon, to some it is a philosophical struggle. To me it is allegro con brio."

At the point where Puccini left off writing the finale of his unfinished opera, Turandot: "Here Death triumphed over art". (Toscanini then left the opera pit, the lights went up and the audience left in silence.).

Toscanini was invited in the year 1940 to visit a movie set at the Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios. There he said with tears in his eyes, "I will remember three things in my life: the sunset, the Grand Canyon and Eleanor Powell's dancing."

See also

List of people on the cover of Time magazine (1920s) (see 25 January 1926)

References

;Notes

Seraphim recordings/liner notes

Arturo Toscanini Society recordings

RCA home videos

Further reading

Antek, Samuel (author) and Hupka, Robert (photographs), This Was Toscanini, New York: Vanguard Press, 1963 (consists of a series of essays by one of the NBC Symphony musicians who played under Toscanini, combined with remarkable rehearsal photographs from the latter part of Toscanini's career).

Frank, Mortimer H., Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years, New York: Amadeus Press, 2002. (Re-evaluates favorably several of Toscanini's most strongly criticized performances. Complete list and analysis of NBC symphony performances under Toscanini as well as other conductors.)

Haggin, B. H., Arturo Toscanini: Contemporary Recollections of the Maestro, New York: Da Capo Press, 1989 (reprint of Conversations with Toscanini and The Toscanini Musicians Knew).

Horowitz, Joseph, Understanding Toscanini, New York: Knopf, 1987 (a revisionist treatment, attacking Toscanini's legacy; contains factual errors corrected by Sachs in Reflections on Toscanini).

Marek, George R., Toscanini, New York: Atheneum, 1975. ISBN 0-689-10655-6 (Contains some factual errors corrected by Sachs.)

Marsh, R. C. Toscanini on Records – Part I: High Fidelity Magazine vol 4,1954, pp. 55–58

Marsh Part II: vol 4,1955, pp. 75–81

Marsh Part III: vol 4,1955, pp. 83–91

Matthews, Denis, Arturo Toscanini. New York: Hippocrene, 1982. ISBN 0-88254-657-0 (includes discography)

Meyer, Donald Carl, The NBC Symphony Orchestra. UMI Dissertation Services, 1994.

O'Connell, Charles, The Other Side of the Record. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947. (Inside view of Toscanini's recordings)

Sachs, Harvey, Toscanini, New York: Prima Publishing, 1995. (Reprint of standard and best biography originally published 1978.)

Harvey Sachs, Reflections on Toscanini, New York: Prima Publishing, 1993. (Series of essays on various aspects of Toscanini's life and impact.)

Harvey Sachs|, ed., The Letters of Arturo Toscanini, New York: Knopf, 2003.

Howard Taubman, The Maestro: The Life of Arturo Toscanini, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951 (contains factual errors corrected by Haggin and Sachs).

Teachout, Terry, Toscanini Lives, Commentary Magazine, July/August 2002

External links

Arturo Toscanini official website

Toscanini's reforms at La Scala

Toscanini and the History of the NBC Symphony plus Live WWII broadcast

NPR special on the selection of the 1938 radio broadcast of Toscanini conducting the NBC Orchestra to the 2005 National Recording Registry

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