United States or Luxembourg ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was half-past three when the first movement of the "Tosca Symphony" ended in the concert-hall. At that hour Ivan returned to his house from a long walk through the whitened fields, and, donning dressing-gown and slippers, went up to his work-room and shut the door.
Yet, in his inner consciousness, hovered always the knowledge that he possessed a sure and unfailing refuge from that terrible "Tosca" whence escape was certain only through extremest measures. Nor did the exquisite vision of the young Nathalie his last living remembrance of that black night often leave him, sitting through solitary evenings with pipe and samovar, quite unchallenged.
It was well parapeted near the sea, and it had heavy cuttings in the white tosca, a rock somewhat resembling the calcaire grossier of the Paris basin. This light pumice-like stone, occasionally forming a conglomerate or pudding, and slightly effervescing with acids, is fertile where soft, and where hard quite sterile. Hereabouts lay Gando, one of the earliest forts built by the Conquistadores.
It was late in the night before there appeared, in the dark room, the vision of his mother's angel-face gazing at him, her clear eyes filled with mingled love and understanding; and midnight had long struck before that which he instinctively expected was finally given: when, like a diapason, crashing, fortissimo, through the dark, rolled the magnificent, despairing chords of the final theme of the great "Tosca Symphony" the motif, the epitome, of his own, dark life.
The need would not be urgent for at least another fortnight since it had been decided between her and LaChaise that she should make her debut in Tosca, an opera she had sung uncounted times.
In the last act, after a passionate duet between the lovers, Cavaradossi is executed Scarpia having given a secret order to the effect that the execution shall be genuine after all and La Tosca in despair throws herself into the Tiber. In 'La Tosca' we are in a world very different from that of 'La Bohème. Here there is very little scope for grace and tenderness. All is deadly earnest.
I reassured him: "She will cook with renewed energy when she begins to sing Sieglinde and Tosca.... She will practise Vissi d'Arte over the gumbo soup and Du herstes Wunder! while the Frankfurters are sizzling. Her trills, her chromatic scales, and her messa di voce will come right in the kitchen; she will equalize her scale and learn to breathe correctly bending over the oven.
T.W. Russell, M.P., who told me some amusing things of one of his colleagues, an ideal Orangeman, who writes blood-curdling romances in the vein of La Tosca, and goes in fear of the re-establishment of the Holy Office in Dublin and London.
By far the larger number of them have their stage clothes made by a theatrical tailor, and only an occasional eccentric celebrity goes to Worth or Doucet to be dressed for a 'Juliet, a 'Tosca, or a 'Dona Sol.
The barber with the poetic beard leaped to his feet, as fluent in welcoming us as he had been in protestations a few evenings before, while the aesthetic young man smiled pensively down at a long-stemmed fleur-de-lis which he slowly twirled in his fingers. The cashier of a Constantinople department store sang from "Tosca."
Word Of The Day