United States or Faroe Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I have seen a big six-foot bass singer, very popular at the opera two or three seasons ago, walking to and fro with the tears running down his cheeks for a long time before his entrance, and one of our greatest coloratura prima donnas has come to me before the opera, sung a quavering note in a voice full of emotion and said, with touching accents: "See, that is the best I can do.
I exhausted my authentic anecdotes the first day; and now I invent gallant escapades with Spanish donnas, in which you figure as a youth of unstable morals. This delights Father Tom infinitely. I feel that I have done you a service by thus casting on the cold sacerdotal abstraction which formerly represented you in Kate's imagination a ray of vivifying passion. "What a country this is!
Nero, the cruelest of emperors, is said to have regaled his ears with music after setting fire to Rome; and you have all heard the story of the two famous prima donnas whose vicious temper and jealousy drove them to a tooth and nail contest on the stage, right before the public.
It is just the outward, healthy stir that goes before certain kinds of theatrical success, and which is quite impossible where most other arts are concerned; perhaps I suggest it with apologies to all living prima donnas and first tenors the higher the art, the less can success be predicted.
"Sire, I have to apologize to you for this unlucky contretemps. Signora Bernasconi has been taken suddenly sick." "Oh!" replied Frederick, laughing, "I am quite au fait to the sudden illness of prima donnas. But since I have ordered a half month's salary to be withdrawn from every singer who falls sick on a night of representation, my cantatrices at Berlin enjoy unprecedented health."
Fresh young faces and noble old visages were side by side, the beauty of youth and the impressiveness of age, and the male countenances were not less striking than those of the females. Truly, it was a grand assemblage, one that should delight the heart and flatter the vanity of even the most capricious of prima donnas.
He never budges from his native village; but he has a theatre in his castle, in which they play his own comedies; he sends for the leading prima donnas, simply that they may sing boorish peasant ditties to him; and he keeps a whole palace for his dogs, who eat with him from the same table." "Anything else?"
"Sire, they will be all most welcome; but I pray you to allow me to add one name to your list, the name of a woman who is more lovely, more gracious, more intellectual, more alluring, than all the prima donnas of the world; who has the power to intoxicate all men, not excepting emperors and kings, and make them her willing slaves. Dare I name her, sire?" "Certainly." "The Signora Barbarina."
With the masses and operas of modern times the case is the same. Genius, which is plenitude of power, adapts itself to all facts. It will receive the outline of a story and weave upon it a wonderful web, which the story shall interpret. But an opera of Mozart's reveals to the voiceless player its whole magnificence. Trilling Prima Donnas and silvery Italian are the addenda and vocabulary.
She was called before the curtain after every act in Madame Angot and Les Cloches de Corneville, and Dick told her that she would cut out all the London prima donnas, giving them the go-by, and establish herself one of the great Metropolitan favourites if he could get a new work over from France.
Word Of The Day