Word: pianissimos
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...more than a chamber opera, and in the cavernous wastelands of the Boston Opera House, the small mass of sound produced was pretty well lost. It was hard enough for most of the paying customers to hear the artists, let alone detect any difference subtler than that between a pianissimo and a fortissimo...
...first act. The second cellist, a 19-year-old boy, could barely be heard. The composer demanded to know his name. "Toscanini," he was told. Toscanini had played the passage exactly as it was marked-pppp. Patiently, Verdi explained that the fault was his own: he really intended only pianissimo, and had exaggerated his directions to make sure that they would be obeyed...
...sharpest critic, was impressed. He wrote: "He sings high and loud [and] does not gulp or gasp or gargle salt tears. . . . Not in a very long time have we heard tenor singing at once so easy and so adequate. . . . He even at one point sang a genuine open-throated pianissimo, the first I have heard in Thirty-Ninth Street since I started reviewing opera six years ago. . . . The wonderful thing took place. . . . Italian singing actors, working under an Italian conductor before an audience that was pretty largely Mediterranean, gave us real Italian opera...
This exaggeration is apparent, for example, in the coda of the first movement, where a gratuitous quarter-rest is added just before the orchestra bounces, fortissimo, into a repetition of the characteristic rhythmical figure. It becomes distortion when the famous theme of the choral movement enters pianissimo where Beethoven has explicitly stated piano...
...wanted her to wear a corset; she refused ("I have to feel what I play from the legs up"). Says Maryla: "My first concert is European. Come one artist in old dress, no photogenic, no smiling. Then come complications. The criticisms are too good. Come snobs, I play too pianissimo, too fortissimo, my hair, I am too fat, my dress. My second concert is American concert. Everyone come to see am I really so good. It is not art, it is sport. It is football! If I have goal, bravo! If no goal, goodbye...