Word: missa
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Although the work for performance with the Boston Symphony next spring has not yet been definitely chosen, Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" is now under study and seems the probable choice...
...increasingly irascible, a pathetic groping figure when he ventured outside music. Biographer Herriot describes Beethoven quarreling with his cook, showering her with vermicelli, taking over the kitchen work himself. He liked to walk but he gesticulated so wildly that children often jeered him. For the first performance of Missa Solemnis he stood in the pit. supposedly to help conduct. He was oblivious to the fact that the singers skipped the passages which seemed to them too difficult...
...noise he made at home, too deaf to hear any of his music at the first Vienna performance in 1824. Nevertheless he insisted on standing in the pit and beating time along with the regular conductor. With a fervor and concentration worthy of the music Arturo Toscanini gave the Missa Solemnis last week its first performance by the New York Philharmonic, the first he has ever conducted. For the occasion he had 250 choristers from the New York Schola Cantorum and four expert soloists-Soprano Elisabeth Rethberg, Contralto Sigrid Onegin, Tenor Paul Althouse, Basso Ezio Pinza. Toscanini sang croakingly along...
...conductors choose to give the Missa Solemnis because of its great technical difficulties, its demands on the human voice for which Beethoven never learned to write considerately. Toscanini last week made such obstacles seem negligible. The parts were perfectly proportioned between the orchestra, the chorus and the soloists. Transitions were managed so skilfully that the most fragile pianissimos seemed the logical conclusion to the mightiest crescendos...
During the Philharmonic's SOS drive (TIME, Feb. 5) there have been many protests against Toscanini's salary, rumored to be between $75,000 and $90,000 per season. The Missa Solemnis rounded out 14 performances in the Toscanini Beethoven Cycle. Each one has sold out to the doors. Bruno Walter and Hans Lange, the other Philharmonic conductors, make a practice of using popular soloists but even so neither one of them this season has been able to sell out Carnegie Hall...