United States or Wallis and Futuna ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They were playing Tosca, Puccini's most inspired composition and the translation of these people behind the walls it really contained that pathos which all artists agree, yet unable to explain how so many children of sunny Italy became world-wide famous for the embodiment of that musical and harmonious pathos of which Tosca is the favorite piece of the greatest living tenor Caruso.
The great concerted piece with which the act ends is a masterly piece of writing, and proves that Puccini can handle a form, which as employed by lesser men is a synonym for stereotyped conventionality, with superb passion and sincerity. But Puccini's earlier successes sank into insignificance by the side of the triumph of 'La Bohème, which was produced in 1896.
There are passages in 'La Tosca' of great lyrical beauty, but as a rule the exigencies of the stage give little room for musical development, and a great deal of the score is more like glorified incidental music than the almost symphonic fabric to which we are accustomed in modern opera. The history of 'Madama Butterfly' , Puccini's latest opera, is a strange one.
With the last it shares one element which brings it into relationship also with a number of much younger and less significant works operas like Mascagni's "Iris," Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," and Giordano's "Siberia." In the score of "Aida" there is a slight infusion of that local color which is lavishly employed in decorating its externals.
He has little of Puccini's grace and tenderness, but he treated the scenes of Bohemian life with amazing energy and spirit, if with an occasional suggestion of brutality. 'Zaza' , founded upon a French play which recently achieved a scandalous notoriety, has found little favour even in Italy.
This scene, which is very short, is a carnival of bustle and gaiety, and is a brilliant example of Puccini's happy knack of handling concerted music. The next scene is a series of quarrels and reconciliations between the two pairs of lovers, while in the last act Mimi, who has deserted Rodolphe, comes back to see him once more before she dies, and breathes her last on the little bed in the attic.
A neighbouring yacht's band that had been silent for the last hour began to play again appropriately to the vicinity Puccini's well-known opera. The strains came subdued but clear across the water on the scent-laden air. Craven sat forward in his chair, his heels on the ground, his hands loosely clasped between his knees, whistling softly the Consul's solo in the first act.
A little later that singularly unheroic person sneaks in with his wife, whom he commissions to interview Butterfly while he waits in the garden outside. Mrs. Pinkerton rather cold-bloodedly offers to take charge of the child, to which Butterfly agrees, and, after a passionate farewell, kills herself behind a screen. Puccini's music is unquestionably the strongest thing he has done yet.
It was impossible to weave a connected story from Murger's famous novel. Puccini's librettists attempted nothing of the kind. They took four scenes each complete in itself and put them before the audience without any pretence of a connecting thread of interest.
If one of the latter happen to pass, he is beguiled into the magic circle, and in the grasp of the relentless Wilis is whirled round and round until he sinks expiring upon the ground. In Puccini's opera, the scene is laid in the Black Forest. The characters are three in number Anna, her fiancé Robert, and her father Wilhelm Wulf. The first act opens with the betrothal of the lovers.
Word Of The Day