#irene weill | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chiseler · 5 years

Text

Theater of War

Towering at six and a half gangling feet, with a long face that drooped like a pensive sunflower over everyone he met, playwright Robert Sherwood loomed large in New York culture, in more than one sense, from the 1930s through the war and beyond. Between 1936 and the coming of war in Europe he gradually transformed from a writer of Pulitzer-winning antiwar plays to a gung-ho war propagandist and speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt. In his shift from isolationist to interventionist, he helped prod the rest of America in the same direction.

New York theater in the 1930s had a long conversation with its audiences about isolation and intervention, war and pacifism. Elmer Rice wrote what are said to be the first two Broadway dramas responding to what was happening in Hitler's Germany: We, the People, which ran at the Empire Theatre on 42nd Street in 1933, and Judgment Day, which opened at the nearby Belasco the following year. Rice -- born Elmer Reizenstein on East 90th Street in 1892 -- graduated from New York Law School in 1912 but preferred courtroom dramas to actual courtrooms. On Trial, his first play (1914), was a giant hit, as was the 1929 Street Scene, a realistic drama about tenement life in New York, which earned him a Pulitzer and was adapted as both a film and later an opera, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes.

In 1932 he visited Germany and was appalled by the fascism and anti-Semitism. He came home to write the sprawling We, the People, which dramatized the lives of working class and farm families being pulled under by the Depression. Rice's message was that unless the businessmen and politicians who ran the country did something, America could be heading for a German-style revolution and fascistic crackdown. Audiences who could still afford Broadway tickets in Depression 1933 didn't go to the opulent Empire Theatre to be hectored and depressed. The show opened in January and closed in March after only 49 performances.

We, the People was in the middle of its short run when the Reichstag in Berlin burned on the night of February 27. The Nazis arrested four Communists and tried them in Leipzig for arson and treason. In the internationally publicized trial, one of the last displays of a free court in Hitler's Germany, only one of the men was convicted (and soon guillotined). Rice used it as the inspiration for Judgment Day, about a show trial in a fictionalized Eastern European country where members of the "People's Party" are accused of trying to assassinate "our leader, Minister-President Grigori Vesnic" of the National Party. Unlike the Leipzig trial, this one ends with an appearance by the dictator Vesnic himself, and his assassination there in the courtroom. Judgment Day fared little better than We, the People, closing after three months.

One of the first Broadway plays to address the Nazis' abuse of Jews -- and the only one of the period that depicted Nazi violence onstage -- was Clifford Odet's one-act Till the Day I Die. The Group Theatre presented it and Odets' Waiting for Lefty at the Longacre Theatre on West 48th Street for 136 performances in the spring and summer of 1935. It was set in Berlin, where Nazis have rounded up some Jews and Communists. They smash one prisoner's fingers with a rifle butt, and kick and beat others. Audiences were shocked and horrified. In addition, Odets flirted with the idea, widely promoted by the left in the 1930s, that the Nazis' brutality and cult of extreme virility were twisted expressions of their homosexuality. One officer tells another that "it might be much better for both of us if you weren't so graceful with those expressive hands of yours. Flitting around here like a soulful antelope. I'm lonely, I've got no one in the whole world." The other replies, "You've got me, Eric."

Two of the most talked-about plays of 1936, when Americans were still almost unanimously isolationist, were outspokenly antiwar: Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead and Sherwood's Idiot's Delight. Shaw, whose actual surname was Shamforoff, was born in the Bronx in 1913 and raised in Brooklyn, where he graduated from Brooklyn College. He was 23 when he wrote Bury the Dead, a bitterly absurdist antiwar fantasy that ran from April to July 1936 at Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theatre. It was set in "the second year of the war that is to begin tomorrow night." The corpses of six young soldiers who died in battle stand up in their shrouds and refuse to be buried. This causes all sorts of problems for the army brass, the warmongering businessmen, and the clergy, while the news media spin it as a sign of "the indomitable spirit of the American doughboy." In the play's best scenes, the corpses' wives and mothers try to convince them to lie back down. A twenty-year-old soldier tells his mom that he lived too little to be content with death. An angry wife berates her husband for only standing up to the generals now that he's dead. When no one can convince them, a frustrated general grabs a gun and tries to kill them all over again, but they simply walk off.

Bury the Dead was a critical sensation. In the Times, Brooks Atkinson raved about "the genius of Mr. Shaw's lacerating drama. It is a rebellious dance of scabrous death on the battlefield. Take it also as a warning from the young." Eleanor Roosevelt had just begun writing a nationally syndicated daily newspaper column, "My Day," which, amazingly, she would keep up until a few months before her death in 1962. After seeing Bury the Dead in May 1936, she wrote that "the thoughts hit you like hammer blows," adding that it would be "long be remembered by anyone who sees it and its strength lies, I think, in the fact that it is the expression of the thought and feeling of thousands upon thousands of people today."

She was right about its longevity: Bury the Dead remains one of the best-known of all American antiwar plays, and continues to be performed in revivals as the country goes from one conflict to the next.

Idiot's Delight followed Sherwood's first bona-fide Broadway success, The Petrified Forest. Sherwood grew up in Manhattan at the beginning of the century, son of a prosperous Wall Streeter and an artist. Just as the Great War broke out in 1914 he went off to Harvard, where he wrote for the Lampoon and the Hasty Pudding Club. When America entered the war in 1917 he volunteered for the American Expeditionary Force, but he was rejected as too tall for combat -- the standard depth for front line trenches was only six feet. So he crossed the border and joined the kilted Canadian Black Watch. On an infantry charge in France he was gassed and got hung up in barbed wire. Like many other young Americans, he went Over There convinced of the righteousness of the war, and came back shocked by its obscene futility.

In 1919 a family friend got Sherwood an entry-level job at Vanity Fair, where Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker took a shine to him. Despite an apparently complete lack of their flair for cunning repartee -- Parker called him the Conversation Stopper -- he joined them in the Algonquin Round Table, the "Vicious Circle," with regulars who included theater critic Alexander Woollcott; Harold Ross, who would start The New Yorker in 1925; the leftist journalist Heywood Broun; and novelist Edna Ferber.

It was Ferber who encouraged Sherwood to write plays. His first work on Broadway, the 1927 The Road to Rome, was a light historical fantasy in which Hannibal is talked out of sacking Rome by the emperor's amorous wife, who convinces him that love, sex and joy are preferable to war, death and pain. Sherwood assayed various topics and styles over the next few years before finding his mature voice with The Petrified Forest, which opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1935 with Humphrey Bogart and Leslie Howard in the roles they would reprise in the Warner Bros. movie that appeared the following year.

Sherwood's Idiot's Delight opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre in May 1936, when Bury the Dead was still running nearby, and ran for 300 performances. In a set-up similar to the one in Forest, an international gaggle of characters gets stuck at a ski lodge in the Italian Alps. Principle among them are a down-at-heels American showman named Harry Van, a wealthy arms merchant named Weber, and the mysterious Russian countess Irene, who is really a show girl and con artist Harry spent a night with years ago. Just as they congregate, war breaks out again among the European powers, giving Sherwood the opportunity to have the characters voice different points of view, from Harry's feckless American optimism to Weber's worldly cynicism.

Irene says to Weber, "I'm so happy for you. All this great, wonderful death and destruction, everywhere. And you promoted it!"

"Ask yourself: why shouldn't they die?" Weber replies. "And who are the greater criminals -- those who sell the instruments of death, or those who buy them, and use them?" He argues that she shouldn't blame men like him for war, but the millions of "little people" who allow themselves to be goaded into fighting with cheap appeals to patriotism and duty.

Sherwood was citing an idea that was central to the antiwar movement in the mid-1930s: the notion that international munitions dealers like Weber, the "merchants of death," had used propaganda and political influence to manipulate the world into the Great War. The remarkable Marine Corps General and twice Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler put this notion succinctly in his pamphlet War Is a Racket, published in 1935. He argued that modern war was choreographed by the arms dealers, steel companies, bankers and other capitalists for their own immense profit and everyone else's terrible loss. In 1934 this idea led to a Senate Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, better known as the Nye Committee for its chairman, the isolationist North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye. The later-infamous Alger Hiss served as its chief counsel. The committee not only put an official stamp on the antiwar movement; it helped prod Congress into passing a series of Neutrality Acts beginning in 1935 that prohibited the export of arms to warring nations; banned loans to warring nations; and forbade U.S. merchant ships from carrying arms to belligerents, even if manufactured elsewhere.

Idiot's Delight won Sherwood his first Pulitzer. He wrote the screenplay for the MGM film adaptation that appeared in 1939, with Clark Gable as Harry Van and Norma Shearer as Irene.

The situation in Europe had changed a great deal between 1936 and 1939, and the film was dated the day it opened. Hitler and Stalin had, each in his own way, made their intentions unmistakably clear, forcing Sherwood and Shaw to reassess their antiwar stances of just three years earlier.

Shaw's The Gentle People: A Brooklyn Fable premiered at the Belasco Theatre in January 1939, with Harold Clurman directing an extraordinary cast that included Same Jaffe, Franchot Tone, Sylvia Sidney, Karl Malden, and Lee J. Cobb. Shaw transposed events in Europe to the Brooklyn waterfront, where a pair of middle-aged fishermen, Jonah and Philip, are preyed on by a Hitleresque thug named Goff. He shakes them down for weekly pay-offs, and for a long while they give in, in effect appeasing him the way England and France appeased Hitler. "We are not all made out of the same material," Goff explains to them. "There are superior people and there are inferior people. The superior people make the inferior people work for them. That is the law of nature. If there is any trouble you beat 'em up a coupla times and then there is no more trouble. Then you have peace."

Eventually, Jonah tells Philip that the only way to rid their neighborhood of Goff is to murder him.

"All my life I wanted only peace and gentleness," Philip counters. "Violence. Leave it to men like Goff."

Jonah replies that "if you want peace and gentleness, you got to take violence out of hands of the people like Goff and you got to take it in your own hands and use it like a club. Then maybe, on the other side of the violence, there will be peace and gentleness."

They kill Goff, and not only get away with it, but get back all the money he extorted from them. In an introduction, Shaw wryly notes: "This play is a fairy tale with a moral. In it justice triumphs and the meek prove victorious over arrogant and violent men. The author does not pretend that this is the case in real life."

When the U.S. went to war two years later, Shaw would enlist in the Army and serve as a warrant officer. He'd put his wartime experiences into two later novels, The Young Lions and Rich Man, Poor Man.

Robert Sherwood was "sickened" when the Soviets invaded Finland late in 1939. Although he still considered himself a pacifist, he had now come to equate isolationism with escapism, reluctantly concluding that sooner or later the United States would be forced to defend itself and "save the human race from complete calamity." He had "consistently tried to plead the cause of pacifism," he wrote in a letter that December. "But the terrible truth is that when war comes to you, you have to fight it." As the outgunned Finns mounted a splendidly courageous defense that humiliated the Red Army through the winter, Sherwood churned out a play about a Finnish family and assorted others who join the resistance. His friends Alfred Lunt, who was of Finnish descent, and Lynne Fontanne agreed to star, and Lunt asked to direct. Montgomery Clift and Sidney Greenstreet were also cast. They were still in rehearsals when Finland finally capitulated in March 1940, but all felt the play should go on.

There Shall Be No Night opened on Broadway at the Alvin (now the Neil Simon) Theatre that April. In the Times, Brooks Atkinson was critical of the play's dramatic weaknesses but not its message, declaring that "the best parts of it speak for the truth with enkindling faith and passionate conviction." Life praised the "simple, poignant story" and said it had "chances of being an important hit."

Isolations from the left, right and middle attacked the play. The Washington Post assailed it as "a rank inflammatory job, pleading for intervention." The Daily Worker denounced Sherwood as a "stooge of the imperialist warmongers," while conservatives called him a stooge of international Communism (because the play theorized that the Soviets were merely Hitler’s tools).

The same month that Sherwood's play opened, Hitler's Blitzkrieg devoured Denmark and Norway. In May German armies poured into Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland. Sherwood wrote a full-page ad that appeared in the New York Times and other newspapers nationwide, asserting that only "an imbecile or a traitor" could fail to see that if Britain and France fell too, America would find itself "alone in a barbaric world – a world ruled by Nazis."

France fell in June, and Hitler's Luftwaffe began bombing England to soften it up for a planned invasion. By the fall of 1940, Sherwood was helping to write Franklin Roosevelt's speeches explaining to the American people why the U.S. had to get involved. After America did enter the war at the end of 1941, Sherwood would run the foreign branch of the government's Office of Wartime Information, including the Voice of America, as well as continuing to help write FDR's speeches. He would not write another Broadway play until the war was over.

by John Strausbaugh

0 notes

todayclassical · 7 years

Text

June 14 in Music History

1594 Death of Flemish composer Orlando di Lassus in Munich.

1691 Birth of composer Jan Francisci.

1710 Death of German composer Johann Friedrich Alberti.

1730 Birth of Italian composer Antonio Sacchini in Florence.

1747 FP of Hasse's "La Spartana generosa, ovvero Archidamia" Dresden.

1760 Birth of composer Candido Jose Ruano.

1763 Birth of German composer Johannes Simon Mayr in Mendorf, Bavaria.

1769 Birth of French composer Pierre-Antoine Dominique Della-Maria.

1769 Birth of French tenor Jean Elleviou in Paris.

1784 Birth of Italian composer Francesco Morlacchi in Perugia.

1813 FP of Isouard's "Français À Venise" Paris.

1820 FP of Schubert's "Die Zwillingsbrüder" singspiel, Vienna.

1854 Birth of composer Frederik Rung.

1865 Birth of composer Auguste Jean Maria Charles Serieyx.

1867 Birth of German band conductor and composer Roland Forrest Seitz.

1872 Birth of soprano Irene Abendroth.

1876 FP of Leo Delibes ballet Sylvia, in Paris.

1877 Birth of French mezzo-soprano Jane Bathori in Paris.

1881 The player piano was patented by John McTammany, Jr. of Cambridge, MA.

1882 Birth of composer Michael Zadora.

1884 Birth of Irish-born American tenor John McCormack in Athlone.

1891 Birth of tenor Karel Hruska in Plzen.

1897 Birth of French bass Pierre Froumenty in Agen.

1900 Birth of French baritone Roger Bourdin in Levallois.

1901 Birth of Dutch composer Emmy Frensel Wegener.

1904 Birth of composer Benno Ammann.

1908 Birth of German tenor Bernd Aldenhoff in Duisburg.

1910 Birth of German conductor Rudolph Kempe.

1911 Death of Norwegian composer Johan Severin Svendsen.

1913 Birth of Czech baritone Beno Blachut in Ostrava-Vitlovice.

1913 Birth of English conductor, arranger, pianist and composer Stanley Black.

1916 Birth of composer Karl-Rudi Griesbach.

1918 Birth of composer Carter Harman.

1920 Birth of composer Helmer-Rayner Sinisalo.

1923 Birth of American conductor Theodore Bloomfield in Cleveland.

1926 Birth of German baritone Walter Raninger in Wieselburg. T

1927 FP of Gliere's The Red Poppy, in Moscow.

1932 Birth of American composer and conductor Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson.

1937 Birth of American composer Burton Greene in Chicago, IL.

1940 Birth of American trombonist and composer Dary John Mizelle.

1942 FP of Sir Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols, for treble voices and harp, at Aldeburgh, England.

1947 Death of soprano Mizzi Zwerenz at age 57.

1947 Death of soprano Anny Krull.

1948 Death of Scottish composer John Blackwood McEwan in London.

1949 FP of Britten's "The Little Sweep, or Let's Make an Opera" an entertainment for young people, in Aldeburgh.

1952 FP in USAmerica of Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera as translated by Marx Blitzstein at Brandeis University's first Festival of the Creative Arts, with Leonard Bernstein conducting at campus, South Street, Waltham, MA.

1954 Death of American contralto Roberta Dodd Crawford in Dallas, TX.

1954 Death of Italian baritone Luigi Montesanto.

1962 FP of Igor Stravinsky's The Flood in the US on CBS Television broadcast.

1965 Birth of Austrian bass-baritone Rupert Bergmann in Graz, Austria.

1968 Death of Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl.

1968 FP of Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 12, by the Beethoven Quartet in Moscow.

1982 Birth of Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang in Shenyang, Liaoning, China.

1985 FP of John Harbison's Concerto for Oboe, Clarinet and Strings. Sarah Bloom, oboe and Charles Russo, clarinet. New College Festival Orchestra, Paul Wolfe conducting, in Sarasota, FL.

1986 Death of Italian tenor Augusto Ferranto.

1990 Death of German soprano Erna Berger.

1991 Death of American baritone Frank Valentino.

1994 Death of American composer, conductor Henry Mancini in Beverly Hills, CA.

2001 FP of Daniel S. Godfrey´s revised String Quartet No. 3, by the Cassett Quartet at the Seal Bay Music Festival in Rockport, ME.

2005 Death of Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini.

#classicalmusic #musichistory #today in music history #todayclassical #onthisday

2 notes · View notes

blackkudos · 7 years

Text

Gloria Davy

Gloria Davy (March 29, 1931, Brooklyn – November 28, 2012, Geneva) was a Swiss soprano of American birth who had an active international career in operas and concerts from the 1950s through the 1980s. A talented spinto soprano, she was widely acclaimed for her portrayal of the title role in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida; a role she performed in many of the world's top opera houses. She was notably the first black artist to perform the role of Aida at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in 1958. While she performed a broad repertoire, she was particularly admired for her interpretations of 20th-century music, including the works of Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Paul Hindemith.

Davy was part of the first generation of African-American singers to achieve wide success and is viewed as part of an instrumental group of performers who helped break down the barriers of racial prejudice in the opera world. She first drew notice in 1952 when she won the Marian Anderson Award, and then as Bess on an international tour of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess from 1954–1956. Concert and opera engagements with major orchestras and opera houses in the United States and Europe soon following. In 1959 she married Swiss stockbroker Herman Penningsfield; at which point she left New York to reside in Geneva, Switzerland. After this point her singing career was mainly based in Europe, with only occasional appearances in the United States.

After 1973, Davy's career shifted from opera towards concert work; although she occasionally still performed stage roles. From 1984–1997 she taught on the voice faculty at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University while still maintaining her home in Geneva. She died in Geneva at the age of 81.

Early life and education

Born in Brooklynn, New York, Davy was the daughter of immigrants from the island of Saint Vincent in the Windward Islands. Her father was a token clerk in the New York City subway system. She graduated from The High School of Music & Art in New York City in 1951 before entering the Juilliard School where she earned a degree in vocal performance in 1953. At Juilliard she was a pupil of Belle Julie Soudant, who also taught opera singers Frances Bible and Andrew Frierson. After completing her degree she remained at Juilliard for one more year to pursue post-graduate studies in opera. In April 1954 she appeared as Countess Madeleine in the U.S. premiere run of Richard Strauss' Capriccio with the Juilliard Opera. She later studied singing in Milan with Victor de Sabata.

Several competition wins drew attention to Davy while she was still a student at Juilliard. In 1952 she was awarded the Marian Anderson Award. In 1953 she won the Music Education League's vocal competition which led to her professional singing debut performing in concert at Town Hall on June 12, 1953 and earned her a contract to perform in concerts with the The Little Orchestra Society under conductor Thomas Scherman. With that orchestra she performed Benjamin Britten's Les Illuminations on March 30, 1954. Music critic Ross Parmenter stated in his review that "[Davy is] a singer of unusual technical skill... she has a voice of wide range that is soft, clear, fresh, and warm. She interprets with imagination and intensity and she handles French as if it were her native tongue."

Early career: 1954–1961

Davy made her professional stage debut on Broadway as one of the Female Saints in the April 1952 revival of Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts at the Broadway Theatre. She returned to Broadway the following October to portray Susie in My Darlin' Aida at the Winter Garden Theatre with Elaine Malbin in the title role. In May 1954 she replaced Leontyne Price as Bess in a North American tour of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess which was organized by impresarios Robert Breen and his wife Wilva Davis. After completing its North American tour in Montreal, Davy went with the production to Europe for performances in Venice, Paris, London, and other cities in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia. The company also made a stop at the Cairo Opera House in Egypt. She remained with the international tour through 1956, making further appearances in the Middle East, Africa, Russia, and Latin America.

Davy met composer and conductor Victor de Sabata when the Porgy and Bess tour reached La Scala in Milan in 1955. Impressed with the young singer, he offered her the title role in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida for a return engagement at that house. Unfortunately, political upheaval in Italy led to the cancelation of her scheduled performance at the opera house, and her first appearance as Aida ended up being at the Opéra de Nice in 1957. Later that year she performed that role in concert with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium in New York with Barry Morell as Radamès and Elena Nikolaidi as Amneris. Aida was also her calling card at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna and the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb in 1968.

Davy's performance at Lewisohn Stadium drew the attention of several notable music organizations, including the Metropolitan Opera, and she was soon working actively with a variety of music groups in New York. In October 1957 she performed the title role in the New York premiere of Donizetti's Anna Bolena for the American Opera Society (AOS) with Giulietta Simionato as Giovanna Seymour for performances at both Town Hall and Carnegie Hall. In December 1958 she sang with the AOS again as Elcia in Rossini's Mosè in Egitto with Jennie Tourel as Amenofi and Boris Christoff, in his New York debut, singing the title role. In January 1959 she returned to Carnegie Hall to sing the title role in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride with Martial Singher as Orestes, Louis Quilico as Thoas and The Little Orchestra Society (LOS). She appeared with the LOS again on October 10, 1960 for the United States premiere of Strauss' Daphne in a concert version at Town Hall in which she sang the title heroine.

On February 12, 1958 Davy made her debut at the Met as Aida with Kurt Baum as Radamès, Leonard Warren as Amonasro, Irene Dalis as Amneris and Fausta Cleva conducting. She was notably the first black artist to appear as Aida at the opera house, and the 4th black artist to appear on the Met stage after Marian Anderson, Robert McFerrin, and Mattiwilda Dobbs. She appeared in 15 performances at the Metropolitan Opera House over four seasons, including performances of Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Nedda in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. In July 1961 she toured with the Met to Israel where she performed the role of Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv. Her last appearance at the Met was as Leonora in Il trovatore with Giulio Gari as Manrico in November 1961.

In October 1960 Davy appeared in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra as the soloist in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 under conductor Eugene Ormandy at the United Nations General Assembly Hall which was broadcast internationally. The following month she made her debut with the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company under the baton of Giuseppe Bamboschek at the Academy of Music.

Later life and career: 1961–2012

After Davy left the Met in 1961, her career was no longer centered in New York but in Europe; a decision she made after marrying Swiss stockbroker Herman Penningsfield in 1959 and making a home with him in Geneva. She began transitioning towards a major European career in 1959 when she performed Aida at both the Vienna State Opera under Herbert von Karajan and at the Royal Opera, London. That same year she performed the role of Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. She sang Aida again at the Teatro Regio in Parma in 1960, and was Aida to Jon Vickers' Radamès at the 1961 Berliner Festspiele under the direction of Wieland Wagner.

From 1961–1968 Davy was a resident artist at the Berlin State Opera where she sang leading roles in operas by Verdi and Puccini among other composers. During this time she also appeared as a guest artist with other opera houses in Europe. In 1961 and 1962 she sang Pamina at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. She returned there in 1969 to sing the Old Prioress in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites; a role she performed that same year from a wheelchair at the Grand Théâtre de Genève. She made several appearances at La Scala in Milan during the late 1950s and 1960s, portraying both Donna Anna and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, Jenny in Kurt Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Nedda, and the title role in Madama Butterfly among others. In 1970 she performed the role of Dido at the Teatro Regio in Parma. She remained busy with major opera houses in Europe through 1972, appearing at opera houses in Aachen, Hamburg, Strasbourg, and Mannheim among other cities. From 1973 on her singing career was more focused on concert repertoire, although she still made a few opera appearances afterwords.

While maintaining her home in Geneva, Davy taught on the voice faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University from 1984 to 1997. She died on November 28, 2012, in Geneva, Switzerland at the age of 81.

Discography

Christoph Willibald Gluck – Armide: Umberto Cattini, Orchestra Angelicum di Milano, Coro Polifonico di Torino. Gloria Davy, Angela Arena, Maria Teresa Mandalari, Giuseppe Zampieri, Lidia Cerutti

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – The Magic Flute: Erich Leinsdorf. Gedda, Davy, Tozzi, Peters, Uppman, Scott, Olvis, Krall, Dunn, Amparan, Allen, Franke, Cundari, Vanni, Roggero, Gari, Sgarro, Arthur, Frydel, Roberts. December 6, 1958

Karlheinz Stockhausen – Momente: Gloria Davy, Boje, Smalley, WDR Choir, Cologne, Ensemble Musique Vivante, Paris, Stockhausen. 1975 Deutsche Grammophon

Giuseppe Verdi – Aida, highlights in German: Argeo Quadri. Davy, Ahlin, Konya, Hotter, Schoffler. Wiener Staatsopernchor, Staatliches Wiener Volksopern-Orchester. Deutsche Grammophon SLPEM 136 402. Stereo. LP Cover printed in Germany, 12/61.

Giuseppe Verdi – Aida, highlights in German: Argeo Quadri. Davy, Ahlin, Konya, Hotter, Schoffler. Wiener Staatsopernchor, Staatliches Wiener Volksopern-Orchester. Deutsche Grammophon LPEM 19 402. Monaural. LP Cover printed in Germany, 11/63.

Pietro Mascagni – Cavalleria Rusticana, highlights in German: Janos Kulka. Davy, Konya, Nagano, Berry. Chor und Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin. Deutsche Grammophon SLPEM 136 413. Stereo. LP Cover printed in Germany, 03/65. With highlights in German of Der Bajazzo (I Pagliacci) by Ruggiero Leoncavallo.

Cesar Franck - Rebecca - Scene Biblique: Mario Rossi. Gloria Davy, Pierre Mollet. Chorus and Orchestra, RAI, Torino. Side 6 of MRF Records MRF-148-S(3). Labeled as a Private Recording. The first 5 sides of this 3-LP set are devoted to Gabriel Faure's "Penelope". Issued 1978 or later.

Wikipedia

#Gloria Davy #03-29 #11-28

8 notes · View notes

karendmills · 7 years

Text

American Thyroid Association Awards Research Grant to Irene M. Min, Ph.D., Weill Cornell Medical College

Supported by Bite Me Cancer and ATA Irene Min, M.D. is the recipient of the 2016 American Thyroid Association (ATA) Bite Me Cancer Grant. Dr….

from Thyroid Issues and Nutrition Supplements https://www.thyroid.org/thyroid-research-grant-min/ from Doctor’s Nutrition of Texas https://doctornutritionoftexas.tumblr.com/post/161899505946

0 notes

doctornutritionoftexas · 7 years

Text

American Thyroid Association Awards Research Grant to Irene M. Min, Ph.D., Weill Cornell Medical College

Supported by Bite Me Cancer and ATA Irene Min, M.D. is the recipient of the 2016 American Thyroid Association (ATA) Bite Me Cancer Grant. Dr....

from Thyroid Issues and Nutrition Supplements https://www.thyroid.org/thyroid-research-grant-min/

0 notes

classicfilmfreak · 7 years

Photo

New Post has been published on http://www.classicfilmfreak.com/2017/06/15/19897/

Show Boat (1951) starring Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel

Ah gits weary An’ sick of tryin’ Ah’m tired of livin’ An’ skeered of dyin’, But ol’ man river, He jes’ keeps rollin’ along! —— lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

A study of the similarities and differences among the stage play, the musical and the three films which sprang from Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat is both interesting and disheartening—interesting for the number of technical improvements made over the years, especially regarding the films, and disheartening for the critical messages that, at times, receive varying degrees of emphasis.

Aside from the evils of racial discrimination—the novel takes place in 1887—a key element in the plot is miscegenation, a mid-nineteenth-century term created to denote intermarriage between different races, which involves two of the main characters. The mention of miscegenation had been banned from the 1929 film version, and even fifteen years later M-G-M had to tread cautiously with the subject, though it finally received approval from the dreaded watchdogs at the Hays Office.

Among the three movie versions of the operetta, the most crucial comparison must be that between the second and third; the 1929 version, a part-talkie, has only a few songs and some scenes are lost. There are those who prefer Irene Dunne and Allan Jones in 1936, plus the magnificent singing voices of torch singer Helen Morgan and Paul Robeson as Joe, the downtrodden back man, and the source of the operetta’s signature tune, “Ol’ Man River.” Some feel this is the best, over-all, of the three movies, thanks in one respect to director James Whale, who considered it the favorite of his films.

Against this, there are others who prefer the later account with Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel. From the master studio of musicals, especially during the zenith of the genre in the 1950s, M-G-M delivers a more sophisticated and polished production than Whale’s small Universal Pictures. Robeson’s own vocal prowess now has its strongest competitor in the resonant bass-baritone of William Warfield, who has his own champions as the Joe. Here, too, is Technicolor, which if it favors no one or anything else, it favors the beautiful Ava Gardner, one half of the miscegenation marriage.

Edna Ferber’s novel is typical of the book-to-play-to-musical-to-movie metamorphosis these artistic creations often undergo. Ferber, who also wrote Cimarron (1929) and Giant (1952), worked on Show Boat in the Basque village of St. Jean de Luz, in Paris and, finally, in New York. From April to September, 1926, it was serialized in Woman’s Home Companion before being published in book form in August of that year.

Ferber was initially shocked that her story was to be made into a musical. Operettas at the time had little or no plots, light, romantic tunes strung together with scant unity, comedy sketches, shallow character development, if any, and, sometimes, scantily clad young ladies. Although the Show Boat story dealt with serious subjects, not only miscegenation but alcoholism and two wife desertions, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II saw in it a radical change for a musical, and wrote a libretto.

Florenz Ziegfeld was the king of Broadway at the time, known for such revues as his “Ziegfeld Follies,” famous for the beautifully costumed girls. He liked what Hammerstein had done, and now with the added music of composer Jerome Kern, he decided to stage it. The composer and lyricist had previously collaborated on several musicals. After tryouts in Washington and other cities, Show Boat made its Broadway début December 27, 1927.

It was an instant hit and marked a turning point for the serious musical. The spirit of Show Boat, with its dramatic plot, integrated songs and distinctive characters, inspired similar musicals—George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935, the lives of poor African-Americans in Catfish Row), Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’sLady in the Dark (1941, psychoanalysis), Richard Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943, the complete integration of story and music) and the latter artists’ South Pacific (1949, once again with a subject of racial intermarriage).

The Cotton Blossom, a paddle-wheel Mississippi riverboat, has docked at a river town in the Deep South. Operated by Captain Andy Hawks (Joe E. Brown), he and his wife Parthy (Agnes Moorehead) run a vaudeville show which features as star attractions Julie LaVerne (Gardner) and her husband Steve (Robert Sterling).

Beginning during the opening credits, the troupe introduces themselves with a chorus of “Cotton Blossom” and extols all the wonderful entertainment now coming to the town. But a fistfight erupts between Steve and the boat’s engineer, Pete (Leif Erickson), who has been making advances toward Julie. Captain Andy announces the ruckus as part of the show, and Pete runs off, saying he’ll get even.

Soon after, Gaylord Ravenal (Keel), a riverboat gambler down on his luck, pretends to be an actor to acquire passage on the boat, but Captain Andy explains an actor isn’t needed. Ravenal sings “Where’s the Mate for Me?” and, in the process, is captivated by Captain Andy’s young daughter Magnolia (Grayson), and she by him. This necessitates another of Show Boat’s endearing songs, “Make Believe,” a duet between the two.

On an upper deck of the riverboat, in a beautiful green dress, Julie sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (Gardner’s voice dubbed by Annette Warren) and shares a little dance with Magnolia, her best friend. Gardner is lusciously photographed by Charles Rosher (nominated for color cinematography)—some critics have said too lusciously, with too many close-ups and some awkward choreography.

In one of the liveliest of the show’s numbers, starting out on a revolving two-seater chair, two members of the company (Madge and Gower Champion, husband and wife in real life), sing “I Might Fall Back on You.” He brags, “Some girls say I’m not so bad!” She counters, “Others say you’re not so good!” The chair is pulled off stage (clearly seen) and they end the duet in a high-stepping dance.

By now, Pete has returned with the sheriff (Regis Toomey), who announces there is a case of miscegenation on the boat. Julie admits that she is half African-American and Steve says that so is he, only because earlier he had pricked Julie’s finger with a straight pin and sucked her blood. Both are exiled from the Cotton Blossom, and leave together in a buckboard.

At this point, as the riverboat paddles away from the dock, and Julie and Steve look back forlornly, Joe sings his one and only song—need he sing another? “Ol’ Man River” rolls out of him like soft thunder as he laments the misery of his life—“Tote dat barge!/Lif’ dat bale!”—while the indifferent Mississippi passes alongside.

Without his two leading stars, Captain Andy now hires Ravenal, and as the Cotton Blossom journeys down the river, from town to town, he and Magnolia become sensations. Not only that, they fall in love, much to the annoyance of Parthy, and marry. Having lived on Ravenal’s gambling wins, when he begins to lose, Magnolia rebukes him for his gaming habit (a plot departure from the stage and 1936 film version). Feeling guilty, he leaves.

In his wanderings, Ravenal comes across the exiled Julie, now a singer on another riverboat, but Steve has left her and she has become an alcoholic. Julie discovers Ravenal’s identity and heatedly condemns him for leaving Magnolia when she was pregnant. Knowing nothing of the pregnancy, he feels another kind of guilt and returns to the Cotton Blossom. There on the dock he happens upon his four-year-old daughter Kim (Sheila Clark) and sings to her a whispery version of “Make Believe.”

Magnolia and Ravenal are reconciled and walk the dock back to the riverboat. As Joe sings a reprise of “Ol’ Man River,” Julie, on the dock, blows a kiss to Magnolia. The boat pulls away, the great rear paddle-wheel churning the waters of the Mississippi, the screen framed by the trees and foliage of the riverbank.

It’s become a cliché, a thought attributed to just about everybody: the American Musical Theatre is easily divided into two eras, everything before Show Boat, and everything after Show Boat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK-mxaocmzo

#Ava Gardner #Howard Keel #Kathryn Grayson #Show Boat

0 notes

todayclassical · 8 years

Text

January 28 in Music History

1627 Birth of composer Alfonso Marsh. 1645 Birth of German composer Gottfried Vopelius near Zitlau. 1691 Birth of German composer and organist Johann Balthasar König. 1693 Birth of Austrian organist and composer Gregor Joseph Werner in Donau. 1722 Birth of German composer Johann Ernst Bach. 1725 FP of J. S. Bach's Sacred Cantata No. 92 Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn on Septuagesimae Sunday following Epiphany, was part of Bach's second annual Sacred Cantata cycle in Leipzig 1724-25.

1742 Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift; author of Gulliver's Travels, objects to the cathedral singers performing Handel's works while the composer is in that city.

1754 Death of Danish lawyer and writer Ludwig Holberg at 69. 1756 Birth of composer Hans Adolf Friedrich von Eschstruth. 1757 Birth of composer Antonio Bartolomeo Brun. 1768 Death of English organist and composer John Wainwright dies at age 44.

1781 Birth of castrato Giovanni Battista Vellutti Castrato.

1791 Birth of French opera composer Louis Ferdinand Joseph Herold. 1798 Death of German composer Christian Gottlob Neefe in Dessau. 1806 FP of Etienne Mehul's opera Les Deux Aveugles in Paris.

1812 Birth of soprano Marie Cornelie Falcon in Paris

1813 Death of Bohemian composer Jan Joseph Rösler at age 45.

1817 Death of composer Friedrich Ludwig Emilius Kunzen at age 55. 1828 FP of Franz Schubert's Piano Trio in Bb, Op. 99 D. 898. Ignaz Schuppanzigh, violin, Josef Linke, cello, and Carl Maria von Bocklet, piano.

1830 FP of Auber's opera Fra Diavalo at Opera Comique, Paris. 1832 Birth of composer Franz Wüllner.

1841 Birth of composer Viktor Ernst Nessler.

1861 Birth of singing coach Isadora Luckstone in Baltimore,

1868 Birth of Scottish composer Frederic Archibald Lamond in Glasgow. 1868 Birth of Argentinian composer Julian Aguirre. 1869 Death of French composer Prudent-Louis Aubrey du Boulley at age 72. 1873 Death of composer Henry Hugo Pierson at 57.

1875 Birth of tenor Leon Laffitte in Saint-Genies.

1875 Birth of Mexican composer, conductor and violinist Julian Antonio Carillo Trujillo in Ahualulco, Mexico. 1876 FP of P. I. Tchaikovsky's Serenade mélancolique for violin and orchestra, in Moscow.

1878 Birth of German composer Walter Kollo.

1885 Birth of baritone Jean Athanasiou in Bucharest.

1887 Birth of Polish-American pianist Artur Rubinstein. 1887 Birth of American composer Lily Theresa Strickland in Anderson, SC. 1891 Birth of Czech conductor and composer Karel Boleslav Jirak in Prague. 1893 Birth of American pianist and composer Elliot Griffos in Boston.

1894 Birth of soprano Laura Pasini in Varese.

1896 Death of English organist, conductor and composer Joseph Barnby.

1897 Birth of soprano Fidelia Campigna in Almeria, Andalusia.

1898 Birth of Italian composer Vittorio Rieti in Egypt. 1898 Death of Romanian opera composer Alexandru Flechtenmacher at 74. 1900 Birth of English pianist and composer Michael Dewar Head.

1903 Birth of Ukraniam composer Yuly Sergueievitch Meytus in Elisavetgrad.

1903 Death of French composer Augusta Mary Anne Holmes at age 55 in Paris. 1903 Death of French composer Jean Robert Planquette at age 54 in Paris. 1904 Tenor Enrico Caruso signs his first recording contract with Victor Records. 1907 Birth of Swiss pianist and composer Constantin Regamey in Kiev. 1910 Death of Spanish composer Jose Garcia Robles at 74. 1913 Birth of Dutch composer Jan Masseus in Rotterdam. 1915 FP of Maurice Ravel's Piano Trio in a. Gabriel Wilaume, violin; Louis Feuillard, cello and Alfredo Casella, piano; in Paris.

1916 FP of Enrique Granados' opera Goyescas. MET Opera, NYC.

1916 Birth of English musicologist and composer Peter Crossley-Holland in London.

1918 Birth of soprano Frances Yeend in Vancouver, Washington.

1923 Birth of tenor Paul Asciak in Valetta, Malta.

1926 Wedding of composer Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. 1927 FP of Aaron Copland's Piano Concerto. Boston Symphony conducted by Serge Koussevitzky, Copland was soloist.

1929 Death of Dutch composer Theodorus Hendricus Hubertus Verhey in Rotterdam.

1930 Death of soprano Emmy Destinn.

1930 Birth of Spanish composer Luis de Pablo in Bilbao.

1932 Death of German-American composer and organist Franz Xavier Arens at 75 in Los Angeles.

1931 Birth of bass Ezio Flagello in New York.

1932 Death of composer Irene Wieniawska in London. aka Poldowski and Irene Wieniawska Paul.

1933 Birth of bass Spiro Malas in Baltimore.

1933 Death of tenor Adolf Krossing.

1935 Birth of Russian composer Leonid Grabovsky in Kiev. 1935 Death of Russian composer Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov at age 75, in Moscow. 1936 Birth of English composer Lydia Aylott in Finnigham.

1936 Birth of American composer Robert Suderburg. 1941 FP of Aaron Copland's Quiet City. Little Symphony conducted by Daniel Saidenberg at Town Hall, NYC. From incidental music, he scored for Irwin Shaw's play produced by the Group Theater, 1939 in NYC.

1942 Death of Spanish composer Pablo Luna Carne at 61.

1943 Birth of soprano Malvina Major in Hamilton N Z.

1944 Death of mezzo-soprano Maartje Offers.

1944 Birth of British avant-garde composer John Taverner in London. 1944 FP of Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 1 Jeremiah. Pittsburgh Symphony conducted by the composer, mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh, PA.

1947 Death of Venezuelan-French conductor and composer Reynaldo Hahn at age 72 in Paris. 1949 Death of Swedish composer Gustav Lazarus Nordqvist at 62. 1952 Death of tenor Anton Sekar-Rozhansky.

1954 Death of bass Allen Hinckley.

1956 Birth of American composer Richard Danielpour in NYC.

1959 Death of Austrian conductor and composer Viktor Joseph Keldorfer at 85 in Vienna.

1960 Death of tenor Ettore Parmeggiani.

1960 Death of Austrian-American pianist-composer Jacques de Menasce at 54 in Gstaad, Switzerland.

1965 Death of Belgian composer Jef van Durme at 57 in Brussels. 1967 Death of baritone Greek Evans.

1971 William Bolcom finishes Poltergeist Rag which he dedicated to Teresa Sterne, former concert pianist and producer for Nonesuch Records. Apparently written in a converted garage next to a graveyard in Newburgh, N.Y.

1972 FP of Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha. The orchestration by T.J. Anderson, in Atlanta.

1973 Death of singing coach Sergei Radamsky.

1981 Death of tenor Agostino Lazzari.

1990 FP of Joan Tower's Flute Concerto. Carol Wincenc and the American Composers Orchestra, Hugh Wolff, conducting, at Carnegie Hall in NYC.

1996 Fire destroys Venice Opera House.

2000 FP of André Previn's Diversions. Previn conducting Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg, Austria

#classicalmusic #todayclassical #today in music history #musichistory #onthisday

0 notes