Word: otello
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Giuseppe Verdi came from peasant stock and never lost the blunt imprint. But the composer of some of the most moving and impassioned operas ever written-Trovatore, Traviata, Rigoletto, Aïda, Otello-remained a hard man only outwardly. Verdi's music eloquently tells the story of the inner man. And so, in a way, did his will...
Burly Tenor Ramon (Otello) Vinay was in a sweat. A Chilean trained for Italian and French opera, he had worked hard for over a year to huff himself into a German-style Heldentenor, and he was all set to sing his first Tristan, with Kirsten Flagstad as Isolde. San Franciscans (and Metropolitan Opera General Manager Rudolf Bing, who sorely needs a successor to Lauritz Melchior) were all set to hear him. But a fortnight ago, with debut day almost at hand, Tenor Vinay was bogged down in Chile. A stubborn Santiago impresario refused to let him leave the country until...
...jolly, volatile Ramon Vinay has plenty of time. A onetime baritone who once gave up singing to run a box factory in Mexico (which he still owns), he already holds the title to the role of Otello at the Met and Milan's La Scala. Now, with Melchior gone from the Met, Vinay will have a good chance at the Tristan title too. A "delighted" Rudi Bing thought Vinay was already "one of the best Tristans I've ever heard...
Back in 1910, when blonde, Pennsylvania-born Florence Wickham was singing Ortrud in Lohengrin and Emilia in Otello at the Met, she never thought of composing an opera herself. Twenty-five years later, long after she had married and retired, she wrote a musical adaptation of As You Like It. Sponsored by her friend, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was produced in tiny Carmel, N.Y., later put on in Germany...
...some different notions about staging this time. In his Otello and Aida broadcasts of 1948 and 1949, the singers had been grouped in front of the orchestra. Last week he mounted them on a platform stage behind the orchestra so they would have room to move around in their parts and thus, he hoped, gain greater expressiveness. The stage had to be just the right height, too. After one rehearsal, son Walter Toscanini told Producer Don Gillis: "Father wants the stage maybe six inches higher." Gillis began an impatient reply, finished it with a smile: "Tell father he can-have...