I spent two weeks in the Eternal City of Rome this January. The first part is here https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-rome-part-one/ I’ve been here on numerous occasions over the years, either for work or for passing visits en route to elsewhere. I’d been to the Sistine Chapel (unforgettable, of course) to St Peter’s, also for work, and to a number of art museums and I’ve had a lot of good Roman meals, but I wanted to spend a longer time here and let it get under my skin. I think I succeeded.

I’ll begin the second part of these blogs about my Roman trip at one its most famous monuments, the Colosseum, Il Colosseo (AD 80), the largest ancient amphitheatre ever built, and a place with a bloody history familiar to us all from stories and films about the gladiators. It is an extraordinary place and, for all the gruesome stories about blood-thirsty massacres of slaves, prisoners and the early Christian martyrs, it’s also the site of mass picnics and other less sadistic entertainments. But, and it’s a big but, you can’t avoid feeling a scary, even shocked, connection to all those slaughtered victims in what was in reality a blood sport. Would we have cheered too, I wonder, if we were in those massive audiences for what were highly dramatised public executions? We don’t know the answer. I had only been past it before in taxis or buses before this, and, of course, when I finally got here, it had to do more than just rain, it deluged. You get weather in Rome during January.

It’s an amazingly well-preserved ruin and there’s more than enough here of its remains to get the feeling of dread and excitement that was felt here two thousand years ago.

It’s just a short walk from the Colosseum to the Roman Forum, Il Foro Romano, another expansive set of classical ruins, once the centre of the Roman Empire. Roman citizens those days called it simply the Forum Magnum, or the Forum.

How the mighty have fallen, I thought, looking at the remains of Ancient Roman glory. I was here on the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated, for the second time, as American president in Washington’s Roman-inspired Capitol building. Seeing the ruins in the rain with those broken statues of some of the Caesars, added to my despair at the American election, but then I thought that those broken statues should be seen as symbols for what will happen one day to the latest world tyrant. Is there hope for us all in the Fall of Rome? Yes! Nothing lasts forever, not even in the Eternal City.

I had brought my writer’s jotting book with me and, here in Rome, I wrote some Fibonacci Poems, Fibs, on the subject of Rome and would-be emperors. They were published in the February 2025 issue of The Fib Review. https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/colin_bell2.html

Feeling less depressed, I couldn’t resist giving my tai-chi practice a go here at the Forum Magnum, thinking that we would have had to learn how to defend ourselves in Ancient Rome.

I visited another famous Roman landmark, known as the Spanish Steps, (La Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti), (built in 1725). The Trinità die Monti is its Italian name. These 135 steps lead to the church of It comes from the church of Trinità die Monti the top, but the steps also lead down to the Spanish embassy to the Holy See, the Palazzo Monaldeschi. So thus the Spanish Steps, familiar from books (Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald, 1933 and The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone by Tennessee Williams, 1950), and movies (mostly famously, Roman Holiday directed by William Wyler, with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, 1953). It is one of the most visited parts of the city. As with the Trevi Fountain, this is a place for lovers, romantics and/or just whimsical selfies. We all have our own internal movies, so why not indulge our imagination here for a moment when we can.

I hadn’t realised was the the Spanish Steps are also right next to the house where the tubercular English Romantic poet, John Keats (1795 – 1821), came for his health but really to die, at the tragically young age of just 25.

Here, in one of the most crowded parts of Rome, the poet’s house was practically empty of visitors which was excellent for me, a dedicated Keats lover since school days.

The room where Keats died can’t help but invoke the tragedy of the young genius’ death, even though the contents of the room itself all had to be burnt because of the health regulations in Rome at the time.

As a museum, it’s a splendid reminder of how much we still have of Keats’ work but, sadly, also how much we might have had if he’d lived to a full age.  Standing in the room where he died, can turn us all into Romantics.

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

 To take into the air my quiet breath;

 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

 In such an ecstasy!

(John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale.)

One of the poet’s last letters is preserved here. It’s a brief and matter-of-fact epistle to his friend about the local doctor’s advice for the now rapidly ailing poet to go out. It was note to the English painter, Joseph Severn (1793 – 1879), who looked after Keats until his death a short time later. Looking down on the Spanish Steps from John Keats’ window, means that I will always associate the poet with this otherwise joyful place.

After Keats, yes, let’s think poetic, but also, maybe go for a refreshing and very Italian glass of Campari.

Just off the Campo Marzio, another of those grand Roman squares, is one of Rome’s many churches, the Basilica Santa Maria del Popolo (Basilica of Holy Mary of the People). It might not look that special from outside, but inside, on permanent display, are two masterpieces by the great Italian painter Caravaggio (1571 – 1610). This was one of three emergency ecclesiastical stops that I planned on my essential Caravaggio tour when I wanted to see all the Caravaggio paintings in Rome. It will surprises me that you can just walk into one of these churches and, yes, here’s another Caravaggio.

At this Basilica are two of the artist’s most dramatic paintings, The Conversion of St Paul (1601) and The Crucifixion of St Peter (1601).

At the Basilica Sant’Agostino, behind another discrete exterior, is another of his masterpieces, Madonna di Loreto (1606)

Here on one of the nave’s pillars, it is easy to miss this mural by Raphael, The Prophet Isaiah (1512). If you’re not careful in Rome, you practically trip over great Italian Renaissance or Baroque paintings everywhere you turn.

In the French church of San Luigi dei Francesi, (St Louis of the French), there are three more Caravaggios, commissioned works on theme of St Matthew, and painted between 1599 and 1602.

The centre piece, with St Matthew and an angel, is known as The Inspiration of St Matthew.

On a moody January day, it was pleasant getting to the Museum of Modern Art (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) without having to get involved in the motor traffic. Walking through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, even at this time of year, is a breath of fresh air, literally, after all those albeit beautiful Baroque churches.

Here there is a permanent collection of mostly Italian paintings and sculpture from the late 19th century until the present. The late 19th century and early 20th century works are crammed together on the walls, 19th century style, but they are mostly visible to more than just a glancing eye. It was tempting to spend more time than I had in this section, but there was more room on the gallery’s walls than I have space for in this blog.

I discovered Italian artists that I wasn’t familiar with in the gallery’s current exhibition, Il Tempo di Futurismo (The Time of Futurism) exhibition, marking the 80th anniversary of the death of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism’s founder, which ran at the gallery until the end of April this year.

I was drawn to the works by Sardinian modernist, Mario Sironi (1885 – 1961), whose reputation, like those of other Futurist artists have been clouded by their association with Mussolini’s Italian Fascist movement. Maybe now, after nearly a century, we should try to see the good things in the art of this period without always dwelling on the negative and disturbing trappings of history.

The exhibition was far from being only brutal and alarming, as in this room devoted to the sparkling light-saturated work of Piero Durazzo, or the photographic section on cinematic photographs of Luca Campigotto.

The relationship in the first half of the 20th century between man and machine, is shown in the most challenging and exciting exhibits in this show, which also includes some of the machines themselves – early aeroplanes and racing cars appealing to anyone who has ever liked making model aeroplanes or cars. Aeroplanes, for good or for ill, have a significant place in this exhibition, none less than a number paintings imagined from the pilot’s view of view from his cockpit, presumably on bombing raids. I haven’t seen anything like this before, that mix of Futurism, art deco abstraction, a touch of daring, and, I have to say, 1930s Fascist agitprop. This is a show that definitely made think and re-think about some of the artists, like the American poet, Ezra Pound, who working and even inspired under the shadow of Italian fascism.

Another quite different exhibition was showing at the same time, but across the Borghese gardens at the Galleria Borghese. It was quite a distance from 20th century The Time of Futurism to Poetry and Painting in the 17th Century. Giovan Battista Marino and the Marvellous Passion.

The ‘Marvelous Passion’ in the title was felt by the greatest Italian poet of the 17th century, Giovan Battista Marino (1569 – 1625), the author of an epic poem Adone (1623) about the love between Venus and Adonis. Marino also wrote an encyclopaedic poetry collection of 624 poems dedicated to, and paired with, an equal number of Baroque works of art, La Galeria (1619). The book is a series of reflections on the relationship between poetry and art. I feel slightly embarrassed to admit that this show was, at least on first glance, more my kind of thing than Italian Futurism. Call me old-fashioned, no, I won’t admit to that, I’ve learnt to love some of those Futurist pictures, and I’m certainly not anti-Modernist. But, I write poetry, maybe not as well as Marino, but I’ve even tried to write a few poems in the Italian language. I’m learning to speak the language and I have had a life-long fascination with Italian epic poetry, Taso, Ariosto and Boccaccio in particular. Add to that my enthusiasm for Italian art from the 14th to the 17th century, then I was always going to be drawn to this show. The exhibition includes paintings and sculptures from Titian to Tintoretto, Correggio to Carracci, from Rubens to Poussin, with Marino’s poems side-by-side. ‘Marvelous’ indeed, and, because of the subject matter, it is sexy too.

The exhibition places quotes from Marino’s work next to the art that he admired on the same subject matter. Here the story of Venus, the goddess of Love and her young lover Adonis, are shown in the sculpture by Cristoforo Stati and in the painting by Jacopo Palma next to apt quotes from Marino’s epic, La Galeria.

Next, and in pride of place, is Bernini’s wonderful Apollo and Daphne, seen from all angles because it is not just so beautiful, but well frightening too. Daphne, the beautiful naiad, a water nymph, from Roman poet Ovid’s story, is desired, maybe loved, by Apollo, but she has been cursed by a jealous Eros to loath sex. She tries to escape from Apollo advances and saved by being turned into a laurel tree by her father, Peneas, a river god. The metamorphosis, to use Ovid’s word for it, is an unforgettable mix of the shocking and the erotic, also caught in a moment when stone is turned into movement.

After so much passion on display here in these rooms at the Galleria Borghese, I moved on to another part of the gallery, the Silenus Room for a display of the gallery’s Caravaggio collection which matches the Marino exhibition perfectly. My epic walking tour of Rome’s Caravaggios continues.

After the famous Galleria Borghese, I wasn’t expecting to find another major art gallery on Rome’s busiest shopping street, the Via Corso, the Doria Pamphili Gallery which have three more Caravaggio paintings. I had to interrupt a trip around the bargain-laden clothes shops that line this bustling boulevard with every store declaring that there was 70% off everything – the ultimate January sales. sales. I didn’t buy anything here, it was time to look inside this relatively unsung palazzo.

Sure enough, the three Caravaggio paintings were here, in their own room, far from the shopping crowds outside. They are early works that already show the artist’s fascination with awkward poses, radical perspective, and ambiguous facial expressions.

Interesting as it was to see these three early Caravaggio works, geniuses are never boring, but, I have to admit that the star work here is definitely not a Caravaggio, but the Portrait of Pope Innocent X (Cardinal Pamphili) by the Spanish master Diego Velázquez. Portraitist supreme, Velázquez shows us a far from saintly pope, so sinister in fact, that I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark Roman alleyway, or even in the great cathedral church of St Peter’s.

A much brighter and bigger alley leads to the St Peter’s….well, they say all roads lead to Rome, and it was out of the question, while I am here, not to go back to the big church at the centre of Christendom. Before I go in, just one last reference to Caravaggio. I wasn’t visiting the Vatican Museum on this trip, but if I had, I could have seen one last Caravaggio that is here in Rome, one of his greatest too. It’s always good to leave something special for another day. The Entombment of Christ (1603), with its figure of the dead Christ, shares the pose and the tragic pathos of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture much admired by Caravaggio. It is one of the greatest of paintings. The Michelangelo Pietà, housed next-door, was one of my main reasons for returning to St Peter’s.

And so to St Peter’s itself. It was a clear January day with a perfect blue sky. Pope Francis wasn’t here, he had been unwell, and in a month he would begin his long stint in hospital being treated for pneumonia, I hadn’t been inside the Vatican since the time of Pope John Paul II, and I didn’t realise that very soon there was to be another new pope, Leo XIV.

The scale of it all is still overwhelming, St Peter’s Square is truly vast when seen from the cathedral steps, and the interior is impressive beyond my words. Leo XIV must have gasped when he walked out onto the balcony just a week ago from when I am writing this. There was hope and a relief for us all to see a modest and caring American becoming a world leader

For all the magnificence of the cathedral, nothing can be compete with the human-sized statue in a side chapel – one of the wonders of the world.

It had been a long walk from my apartment near The Pantheon, and I needed to sit for a while before the return journey. Looking for a seat, I found this chapel not far from the exit. I admired the altar’s painting of St Sebastian by Domenichino (1631) and sat here as people, in groups or alone, came in to kneel at the altar. I didn’t realise until later that under the altar here is the tomb of Pope John Paul II (1920 -2005), but I could see that this was obviously a pilgrim’s destination. A statue of the sainted pope sits watching from on his throne to the side. I am not a Roman Catholic, I wasn’t always impressed by Pope John Paul II’s announcements, but I could also admire his courage and charisma. Whatever I feel about catholicism, I felt something here, more than just being rested and refreshed.

Outside, the sky was red, a shepherd’s delight, an awe-inspiring sight in an awesome place.

Impressive too was the flood-lit Castel Sant’Angelo on the other side of the River Tiber, across from St Peter’s. It was originally built by the Emperor Hadrian for his own mausoleum. It is another Rotunda in a more brutal style than the Pantheon, and it has served as a forbidding symbol of Imperial and Vatican power over the centuries. The ashes of Emperor Hadrian and all his successors were all buried here until the year 217. The last urn belonged to the assassinated Emperor Caracalla, one of the most tyrannical of all Roman Emperors. He set the bar so high that none of his successors could compete whit his reputation for cruelty. After the Fall of Rome, the castle/mausoleum became a papal prison a carrying on the tradition of cruelty, you might think. Executions were carried out there in a small inner courtyard, as in the last act of Puccini’s opera, Tosca. The opera that had begun its story down the road from here at the Basilica Sant’Andrea di Valle, as I described in part one of this blog. The tragic heroine, Floria Tosca, jumps to her death from the tower after her lover Mario Cavaradossi was tortured and then executed there by firing squad. Before he is shot, he sings another, his second, famous aria from up there, ‘È lucevan le stelle’ (‘The stars were shining’). Knowing he will die, he sings that he has never loved life so much. The second tenor aria in the opera, and the second of the two greatest of some of Puccini’s greatest arias for tenor. I couldn’t help humming it on my way back to the Pantheon. Here is Jonas Kaufmann again from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

E muoio disperato!

E non ho amato mai tanto la vita,

I die in desperation

and have never loved life so much!

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/e-lucevan-le-stelle-stars-were-shining.html

It wouldn’t be fair to Rome, if I didn’t finish this blog with a record of all the fun I’ve had in Roman restaurants over these two weeks. Rome has the most extraordinary history, often bloody and tyrannical. It has a genius culture beyond compare, often in spite of the bloody history and an architectural history that has defined in some way almost every building that has been designed since. All of that makes it an unmissable city, but one of the main reasons why anyone should think of coming here is what it is like today. The food, the wine, the good humour and the sheer fizz of eating out in this city, makes it party town. I can’t wait until I am lucky enough to return.

After dinner, there will be a final leisurely stroll, known as a passeggiata, back via a floodlit Pantheon, to the apartment and bed. Arriverderci Roma!

The post Two weeks in Rome – part two. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

In December 2019, I spent a week in Milan. It was raining, no surprise there for this part of Italy during December. It was wet but achingly beautiful. As a fashion-shopping mecca internationally, not even the rain could dampen its elegance and style – especially as the rain appeared to be here just to highlight the city’s beautiful Christmas illuminations.

Galleria Vittorio Emmanuelle II (built between 1865 – 1877), is Italy’s oldest surviving, and grandest, shopping gallery, dare I call it a mall (?), designed by the architect Giuseppe Mengoni (1829 – 1877). It is, without question, unlike any of your average inner city shopping centres. Here, as in Milan generally, high fashion and design reign supreme, giving window-shopping and window-dressing a whole new meaning.

I was walking round the city with my camera, getting wet, and trying to get a shot of the cathedral, right next-door to the Galleria. I was not alone at this camera position, but I didn’t expect a glamourous woman to oblige with an instant modelling pose. I took a photograph, of course, and only afterwards realized that she was magazine fashion and that a magazine photographer was standing right behind me. I shouldn’t have been surprized. standing here in Milan, the international capital of fashion.

All the major fashion houses had their wares on display in the shop windows inside the galleria – they turned the building into an art gallery.

I was in Milan just before Christmas in 2019, and, tempting though it was, this was definitely not the place to go bankrupt for my Christmas shopping.

Even the ice-cream looked like the set for a fashion show.

After the Galleria, I looked for a bar. This place looked quiet and just right for a relaxing drink before moving on for somewhere to eat.

I hadn’t noticed the venue’s name, Ristorante Vista Duomo, and it was what just it’s name promised, a restaurant with a spectacular view of Milan cathedral. It was almost by accident that I found myself here. I thought it was just a bar for a quick aperitif before finding a pizza somewhere in this well-heeled city. Then I discovered that there was a restaurant upstairs that was just being vacated by a fashion magazine shoot and I managed to persuade the staff to let me take drinks up there for the view before the restaurant opened for dinner. One thing, and one drink, led to another, and, yes, I ended up at the best table with the best view in Milan. The food was excellent and not as bank-breaking as you might think. It was only later that I was told this this establishment is currently the trendiest restaurant in town.

The view from the Ristorante Vista Duomo with Milan Cathedral and the piazza all lit up for Christmas.

I was staying in Milan’s Chinatown in a street-level apartment, luckily with very efficient double-glazing.

Next day I found here was also a space at the back, a residents’ car-park, where there was room enough for my daily martial arts routine, tai-chi and kung fu with an over-optimistic salute to the sun.

Just as essential, round the corner, was a welcoming café that served first class coffee and croissants every morning. I like Milan.

It was a short walk from Chinatown to two famous apartment and office buildings, known as Bosco Verticale,(vertical forest), the 2014 inspiration of architect Stefano Boeri, regarded as one of the ‘fifty most iconic skyscrapers in the world’ (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat).

Bosco Verticale was impressive enough on a wet day in December, and I can imagine the thrill of living there in summertime.

Traveling round the city was easy on the remarkably efficient, clean and civilised metro system which always seemed to have a station exactly where I needed there to be one.

Chinatown to the Cathedral was a mere five to ten minutes by underground on trains that put the London system to shame.

Milan Cathedral is the largest church in Italy and the third largest in the world. It was built with Candogli marble. Work began in 1386, and, because of it’s uniquely complex exterior, this gigantic Gothic cathedral wasn’t officially completed for another 579 years, in 1965. When I visited in 2019, another bout of restoration work had just about been completed, that the building was looking just about picture perfect.

Another historically and architecturally important building in Milan is the Castello Sforzesco, Sforza’s Castle, a medieval fortification built between 1358 – c.1370 and rebuilt in 1450 by Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, and his son Ludovico Sforza, patron of Leonardo da Vinci, (who lived and worked here, as an artist and as an engineer, between 1482 – 1513) The castle was damaged and restored many times during five hundred years of tumultuous history of the city when Milan was under either Spanish, Austrian or Napoleonic rule, before Italian Unification in 1871. In the 20th century it was severely damaged by Allied bombing during World War Two. It is now an extensive museum complex with much to see, even on a typically wet Milanese afternoon.

Inside Castello Sforza is the Biblioteca Trivulziana, an historic collection of manuscripts assembled in the 18th century, that includes an autographed notebook by Leonardo da Vinci and fifteenth century editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

A page from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Trivulzianus, kept at the Biblioteca Trivulzian

The refectory, or dining hall, at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie is the site of one of the most famous paintings in the world – Leonardo da Vinci’s mural L’Ultima Cena, The Last Supper (1495 – 1498),

This much-damaged and restored icon of world culture, is kept in a strictly controlled environment where only a few visitors at a time are allowed in for a very restricted period when they can admire this great masterpiece by one of the greatest masters of all.

The Last Supper is familiar to everyone from photographic reproductions, but, my photographs included, none give a true impression of the power of this painting. Its profundity has an emotional punch that is more than the brilliance and drama of its depiction of Christ and his disciples and their last meal together. It was by only standing in the same room that I realised that Leonardo created a sense of true spiritual transcendence beyond any other work of art in my experience. If there was ever a must-see painting it is this.

There is too much see in Milan and I was only there for a week. I had to be highly selective about where I should go and what I should see – and what I should leave out. The Brera Art Gallery, however, was an essential visit, and even after seeing the Leonardo da Vinci, I felt I had to take the opportunity of seeing some of the other masterworks held here in Milan.

If I had to name two artists, I suppose it would have to be the Brera Gallery’s Caravaggio and Raphael but I can’t count, so the two would become four with Mantegna and Piero della Francesca. But, hey, I don’t need to say two or four or any other number. I just need to persuade you to go visit.

The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1480) by Mantegna

The Virgin with Child, Angels and Saints (1472-4) by Piero della Francesca

The Marriage of the Virgin (1504) by Raphael

Supper at Emmaus (1606) by Caravaggio

Then there is the Museo del Novecento, sitting next-door to the cathedral and that too is filled with masterpieces, including Modigliani’s Portrait of Paul Guillaume (1915), but there are some other 20th century Italian painters new to me here too. Giacomo Balla, Giorgio Morandi and Umberto Boccioni. There’s a Picasso too.

Finally, of course, I can’t say Milan with immediately thinking La Scala – Italy’s most famous opera house. I would have been very disappointed if I had come here and not been able to go to an opera – especially an Italian opera, especially one by Verdi or Puccini.

Puccini it was….his opera Tosca with a terrific cast of singers and a big cinematographic production by Davide Livermore, conducted by La Scala’s dynamic music director, Riccardo Chailly.

Luca Salsi (baritone), evil and thunderous voiced as police chief Baron Scarpia

Francesco Meli, (tenor) mellifluous and passionate as romantic painter Mario Cavaradossi.

and Saioa Hernandez (soprano), big voiced and glorious toned as the prima donna Floria Tosca.

It was a wonderful way to mark my lifelong ambition to come to the opera here and to celebrate Italian opera in its international capital.

The post Milan – city of fashion, music and art, even in the rain. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

After all the obituaries of the great Australian soprano, including my quite personal recollections last week here on this site, I thought i had said my last words on Joan Sutherland but then I came across this clip on Utube singing part of act two from puccini’s opera Tosca – a part forever associated with that other great soprano, Sutherland’s near contemporary, Maria Callas who was also a great Lucia in Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor.

Now that sadly both prima donnas have left us, maybe it is time to stop taking sides on who was better at what. I loved Sutherland in Lucia and will always find it near impossible to hear anyone else sing it even though I respected Callas’s dramatic intensity and control over her sensational but wayward voice in the part.

Simmilarly, having only heard Sutherland tackle the act two aria from Tosca, “Vissi d’arte”, I could never imagine her singing the part on stage and I will always love Maria Callas in that part more than in anything else that she did.

It was a surprize for me then to come across this clip made in 1968 when Sutherland sang part of that second act with the sensational, Italian baritone, Tito Gobbi as Baron Scarpia, the evil chief of the Roman police who wants to have his way with her as the price of releasing her lover. Gobbi, still the supreme Scarpia played the role many times with Callas but this short scene was his only time singing any of the role with Joan Sutherland.

I dreaded seeing it thinking that the comparison between the prima donnas would be odious and unfair but….yay! …..the Australian did good.

She would never match Callas as an actress, of course, no other soprano ever has, but she is perfectly good in the part and a lot better than many other sopranos with much less voice. Callas was unique in her greatness as an actress on the operatic stage and, it is somehow a distraction for any of us to look for anyone else to match her art.

Sutherland was a big woman with a big voice and she was capable of singing anyone off the stage in pure vocal terms. She struggled to bring dramatic intensity to her physical movements and preferred to compensate by doing it all with the voice. She was taller than Gobbi just as she was usually taller than many of the tenors that she sang with on stage even in their customary platform heels and she developed that habit of bending forward and scrunching herself up but, just as her facial expressions are familiar from similar situations of anguish in hundreds of her other roles, she does more than enough to give us  a dramatic account of Floria Tosca’s predicament and, of course, her’s is a sensational account of the music with none of Maria Callas’ sour vocal difficulties and a beauty of tone that is sustained throughout her range with, as you can hear when comparing the size of the voice with Gobbi’s, a voice that was thrillingly gigantic too.

When Gobbi suggested that they do the part together on tour, she refused knowing that she had many other opportunities of showing of her accomplishments without tempting providence in the role of her greatest rival for greatest soprano of the Twentieth Century. The relatively few Puccini roles that she took on stage was a disappointment – I would have loved to see her Princess Turandot – but she knew what she was doing and we should all be grateful for what she gave us.

I regret that we have no one of the calibre of Sutherland or Callas today and that we are unlikely ever to hear their like again so I have put my prejudices behind me and just enjoyed this scene for what it is – operatic genius. I suggest you do the same.

Tito Gobbi, by the way, right at the end of his career when he did this can show us all how powerful opera can be when acting comes  together in both voice and body – he too was unique.

Oh yes and that Oakleys’ For Sale sign across the road. Yep, still there in spite of their promise.

——————————————————————————————————————–

STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

You can  pre-order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

The post Sutherland as Tosca and me forgetting Maria Callas for a moment. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.