Word: boh
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...custom at the Turin Royal Theater to keep the electric lights burning in the house so that the audience could follow their scores and see to eat their box lunches. But for the first performance of La Bohème, young (28), bristle-haired Conductor Arturo Toscanini ordered the house lights turned out. Further, he instructed his Mimi (Soprano Cesira Ferrani) to stay in character once she started to succumb to consumption in Rodolfo's drafty garret in Act IV; there would be no rolling around in the creaky bed for encores...
Despite some indignation over this devotion to Composer Giacomo Puccini's realism of plot and tender score, the first performance of La Bohème was a success. The critics aloofly condemned Puccini for writing down to the mob. But there were 15 curtain calls. The great Giuseppe Verdi was notably absent, but Pietro (Cavalleria Rusticana) Mascagni and Ruggiero (Pagliacci) Leoncavallo, sitting in boxes, led the cheering. Tall, droop-mustached Giacomo Puccini, 37, tearfully embraced Toscanini. La Bohème, a work with a realistic human story,* has been one of the most popular operas ever since...
...Manhattan last Sunday, in NBC's streamlined, salmon-pink studio 8H, little, white-haired Arturo Toscanini, 78, celebrated the soth anniversary of that night in Turin by conducting La Bohème's first two acts on the air. He scheduled the last two acts for the following Sunday...
This time the world's greatest conductor, of opera or anything else, put on a Bohème without costumes or scenery, and with no box lunches in the studio audience. He lined up his cast of soloists (mostly Met stars) before the mikes like an old-fashioned singing class, so that he could keep a sharp eye and a firm baton on them. Tenor Jan Peerce, in the first act's duet with Soprano Licia Albanese, closed on a lower E (as Puccini wrote it) instead of the flashier high C he likes to exit...
Then she told how it all happened. Toscanini, who had conducted the world premiere of Puccini's La Bohème in Turin in 1896, was to perform it again, on its 50th anniversary, over NBC. He had picked the Met's Licia Albanese for Mimi, Jan Peerce for Rodolfo. For the second feminine lead (Musetta) he had tried out 30 women, was satisfied with none. Then Met Conductor Wilfred Pelletier, who teaches at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, suggested a 20-year-old, plump, black-haired pupil of his, who so far had sung only...