Word: parma
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...Mouth of the Wolf (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).º A special documentary on grand opera in Parma, Italy, featuring the season's opener, Verdi's Luisa Miller...
...through the '40s, Composer Ferrari Trecate had searched for a way to express his hatred of tyranny. But while he strained for inspiration, the Fascists fell in Italy and the Nazis fell in Germany and poor Ferrari Trecate was left back at the Parma Music Conservatory without a regime to hate. Then his problem was solved. "I wanted to bring a little offering to human liberty to the world." he recalls, "and I wanted to bring the problem of enslavement to the public eye. As soon as I read Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Christian thought of Harriet...
Working with an Italian libretto supplied by a former pupil, Ferrari Trecate had his three-act opera written within a year. But after one quiet 1953 performance in Parma, it lay forgotten until Rome decided to produce it again. Its minor-key Italianate melodies, skillfully woven into choral passages that hint of Negro spirituals, are warm and rich in legato beauty, completely devoid of any modernisms, reminiscent of Puccini. The first-night audience in Rome greeted it with 20 curtain calls, and Roman critics pronounced it good enough for the regular repertory...
Still, Ferrari Trecate's heart was clearly in the right place, and his opera had the antic appeal of an American tragedy written by an Italian who has never seen America. "My entire knowledge of American music is from the gramophone records I listen to in Parma," the 78-year-old professor explained. "I have been to America only in my dreams. I will be happy if my opera is performed again, but I must admit that my greatest ambition is to write music for the films of Walt Disney...
Historian's Notes. The drawings tell interesting tales of art history. Correggio's Two Putti and two companion studies furnish proof that he was responsible for conceiving the decoration in an arch in Parma's church of St. John the Evangelist. Two Studies of a Man Suspended by his Leg was Andrea del Sarto's preparation for an unappetizing commission: a painting for public display of some traitors who were to be shown, according to custom, hanging by one leg. One feature of the collection is a number of scenery designs done by Inigo Jones; some...