"The Virtuosi" [.]

[fiefoe]

Names that are going to stick in my mind a bit longer after this book: Elsa Maxwell, Sol Hurok, Pauline Viardot, (lover of Turgenev, inspiration for "Consuelo", a book that got me into trouble way back.) Also this factoid - before 1950, America only had four opera companies of any real size and season; this phrase - 'a burst of tenor-ian logic'.

<Kreisler>
    After leaving the conservatory at 12, Kreisler never had further musical instruction of any kind.
    His shrew of a wife, Harriet gave this interview when he was al but canonized: "(Fritz isn't the sweet man everybody thinks he is.) and not only that. He's around the house all the time. Most women's husbands go to the office from nine to five every day." She also said Fritz was lazy and had to be nagged into practicing.

<Vocalists>
    The contralto Schumann-Heink once came on stage during a rehearsal... en route, knocked over a whole row of violin stands, and some violinists, too. Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the conductor, watched her admiringly and said, "Tina, why don't you walk sideways when  you come from the wings?" Schumann-Heink looked at him in disbelief. "Ossip," she said, "you know that with me there is no sideways."
    Caruso: in warming-up, he would pull at his tongue; he thought that made it supple.
    Callas wrote to her mother, "Don't come to me with your troubles, I have to work for my money and you are young enough to work too. If you can't make enough money to live on you can jump out of the window or drown yourself."

<Josef Hofmann>
     ... had a scientific bent & held patents on automobile shock absorbers and piano actions.

<Solti>
    During the Royal Opera (in Covent Garden)'s rehearsals of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, "Voman. Cannot you say voman?"

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