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Updated: June 18, 2025
Near the close of the season she appeared in Verdi's "Vêpres Siciliennes," in which, we are told, "she sang magnificently and acted with extraordinary passion and vigor. At the close of the fourth act, when Helen and Procida are led to the scaffold, the conflicting emotions that agitate the bosom of the heroine were pictured with wonderful truth and intensity by Mlle. Titiens."
'La Traviata' is an operatic version of Dumas's famous play, 'La Dame aux Caméllias. The sickly tale of the love and death of Marguerite Gauthier, here known as Violetta, is hardly an ideal subject for a libretto, and it says much for Verdi's versatility that, after his excursions into transpontine melodrama, he was able to treat 'drawing-room tragedy' with success.
When he takes his evening walks, the peasantry, who are devotedly attached to him, unite in singing choruses from his operas. In Verdi's bedroom, where alone he composes, is a fine piano of which instrument, as well as of the violin, he is a master a modest library, and an oddly-shaped writing-desk. Pictures and statuettes, of which he is very fond, are thickly strewn about the whole house.
Though he often said that if he wrote what the editors wanted him to write, very soon they would not want what he did write, he replied to my saying that Verdi's most popular opera was written to order, that a similar request from an editor gave him a hint from which he wrote one of his best essays.
She had made her début seven years before, and was a singer of dramatic fire and vocal splendour, we are told. Her enthusiasm for Verdi's work not only fastened the claim of operatic art upon him, but won his interest in her charms also, and Verdi and she were soon joined in an alliance, which after some years was legalised and churched.
"Well, my dear Vaudrey, what is the news?" said Warcolier, bearing his head high and smiling with a silly, but an aggressively benign expression, with the superior tone of satisfied fools. "Nothing!" said Sulpice. "I think Verdi's music is superb!" "Oh! a little Wagnerian," Warcolier replied, repeating what he had heard. "But what of politics?" "Ah! politics concerns you now!"
To better illustrate the false art which mars so much of Verdi's dramatic method, a comparison between his "Rigoletto," so often claimed as his best work, and Rossini's "Otello" will be opportune.
Compare this scene with that in Verdi's Falstaff, where that fat hero, hiding behind a screen, must be supposed not to hear an elaborate ensemble number sung by the other characters an instance which one might presume to be intended to make the "aside" so ridiculous that no one would ever dare to use it again.
They were giving an opera of Verdi's, which though, honestly speaking, rather vulgar, has already succeeded in making the round of all the European theatres, an opera, well-known among Russians, La Traviata. The season in Venice was over, and none of the singers rose above the level of mediocrity; every one shouted to the best of their abilities.
About the 25th of this month I expect them here, where, in the meantime, I am terribly bored by the load of tedious things which are imposed upon me, and with the relation of which I will not trouble you. On the 16th the theatre will be opened with Nicolai's "Merry Wives." After that we shall have "The Huguenots," "Cellini," and Verdi's "I Due Foscari."
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