Word: italian
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...trying to persuade his friend Joe Widener to join him, since their two collections were perhaps the world's finest in private hands. Last time the two met, Mellon vowed, "I'll have you in with me yet." The addition of the Widener paintings and the fine Italian collection presented last summer by 5-10-25? Storeman Samuel Henry Kress (TIME, July 24) would make Washington's National Gallery one of the great galleries of the world...
...swankest of the arts in 18th-Century London was Italian opera. Periwigged courtiers, who could not understand a word of it, raised their lace cuffs to applaud the ornate trilling of swivel-voiced prima donnas. Fashionable composers like Handel had to write their librettos in Italian. The Caruso of the period was the Italian eunuch-Francesco Bernardi Senesino, whose misfortunate voice earned fabulous sums at London's Royal Academy of Music. Lustier London wits like Henry Fielding began poking fun at this artificial art, inveighed against London's "wanton, affected fondness for foreign musick," with its "squeaking recitatives...
...poet colleague of Fielding named John Gay decided to take Italian opera for a ride. He picked his tunes from the songs the butchers & bakers sang, strung them on a lowbrow plot about London cops, gangsters and bums, made his tattered characters ape the flouncy foibles of London's diamond horseshoe. His musical show, The Beggar's Opera, became London's biggest...
...centuries passed, the classically prim Italian operas were forgotten, but the frowsy Beggar's Opera became a classic. Last week the Beggar's Opera even made the 20th-century radio, when a company under Conductor Josef Honti gave it a first broadcast over NBC's Red network. John Gay's ribald lines had been studio-broken, but there were still some 18th-Century cracks which strained the broadcasting code ("Yes, indeed, the Sex is frail. But the first time a woman is frail, she should be somewhat nice methinks, for then or never is the time...
...late as the early iQth Century it was an Italian custom to produce artificial "male sopranos" by castration. These castrati often developed into world-famed opera singers...